The mythic drums beat loudly every summer. It is the time of baseball thegame, we are reminded once again, that holds a hallowed place in American hearts and minds, that is the touchstone of the national experience and spirit. Indeed, documentary filmmaker Ken Bums has said that baseball ranks right up there with the Civil War as "totally revealing of the American character."
That kind of epic pronouncement tends to be made by men--and it leaves most women scratching their heads. What do they mean? (Maybe, women muse, that baseball is revealing of the American male character? Slow, lumbering, itchy?) Passionate as many women are about the sport, few would ever think to celebrate it, as have men, as the American version of "Norse sagas or legends of the Samurai" or "the very reason we were put on this Earth." Nor would they find it a satisfactory metaphor of life. Men claim the game mimics life's indomitability (three up, three down), its rhythms (bursts of action amidst long periods of languor), its triumphs and tragedies (opportunities seized and lost, fortunes rudely reversed). Women see an absurdity in reducing life to a sward of green, a dirt diamond and a scoreboard.
