Of the Times...

Oriole Park at Camden Yards by Max Mason

The scene is instant, whole and wonderful.  In its beauty and design that vision of the soaring stands, the pattern of forty thousand empetalled faces, the velvet and unalterable geometry of the playing field, and the small lean figures of the players, set there, lonely, tense and waiting in their places, bright, desperate solitary atoms encircled by that huge wall of nameless faces, is incredible.  And more than anything it is the light, the miracle of light and shade and color--the crisp blue light that swiftly slants out from the soaring stands and, deepening to violet, begins to march across the velvet field and towards the pitcher's box, that gives the thing its single and incomparable beauty.
     The batter stands swinging his bat and grimly waiting at the plate, crouched, tense, the catcher, crouched, the umpire, bent, hands clasped behind his back, and peering forward.  All of them are set now in the cold blue of that slanting shadow, except the pitcher who stands out there all alone, calm, desperate, and forsaken in his isolation, with the gold-red swiftly fading light upon him, his figure legible with all the resolution, despair and lonely dignity which that slanting, somehow fatal light can give him.
                                                                                           --Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

It has been said that baseball is who we were, and football is who we've become.  But who has ever written about football as beautifully as Thomas Wolfe does above?  Baseball will undoubtedly live longer.  At the very least on the green fields in our minds.