Life ... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfini...shed business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week bef...ore you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Innings and afternoons. Fly lost in sunset. Throwing arm gone bad. There's your old ball game.... Cool reek of the field. Reek of companions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a... game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant way of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant abstract image of industrial society living by split-second timing, has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life. In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance. It agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in the electric age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any balance we achieve between adult and parental identities, between children's and our own needs, works only for a time--because..., as one father says, "It's a new ball game just about every week." So we are always in the process of learning to be parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »