Baseball Stadium Quotes

Baseball isn't just a game. It's the smell of popcorn drifting in the air, the sight of bugs buzzing near the stadium lights,the roughness of the dirt beneath your cleats. It's the anticipation building in your chest as the anthem plays, the adrenaline rush when your bat cracks against the ball, and the surge of blood when the umpire shouts strike after you pitch. It's a team full of guys backing your every move, a bleacher full of people cheering you on. It's...life

I smile as I leave them, wondering what building my dad would try to save with his writing.Probably a baseball stadium. Or a Burger King.

One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.

I’M LOSING FAITH IN MY FAVORITE COUNTRY Throughout my life, the United States has been my favorite country, save and except for Canada, where I was born, raised, educated, and still live for six months each year. As a child growing up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I aggressively bought and saved baseball cards of American and National League players, spent hours watching snowy images of American baseball and football games on black and white television and longed for the day when I could travel to that great country. Every Saturday afternoon, me and the boys would pay twelve cents to go the show and watch U.S. made movies, and particularly, the Superman serial. Then I got my chance. My father, who worked for B.F. Goodrich, took my brother and me to watch the Cleveland Indians play baseball in the Mistake on the Lake in Cleveland. At last I had made it to the big time. I thought it was an amazing stadium and it was certainly not a mistake. Amazingly, the Americans thought we were Americans. I loved the United States, and everything about the country: its people, its movies, its comic books, its sports, and a great deal more. The country was alive and growing. No, exploding. It was the golden age of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream was alive and well, but demanded hard work, honesty, and frugality. Everyone understood that. Even the politicians. Then everything changed. Partly because of its proximity to the United States and a shared heritage, Canadians also aspired to what was commonly referred to as the American dream. I fall neatly into that category. For as long as I can remember I wanted a better life, but because I was born with a cardboard spoon in my mouth, and wasn’t a member of the golden gene club, I knew I would have to make it the old fashioned way: work hard and save. After university graduation I spent the first half of my career working for the two largest oil companies in the world: Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. The second half was spent with one of the smallest oil companies in the world: my own. Then I sold my company and retired into obscurity. In my case obscurity was spending summers in our cottage on Lake Rosseau in Muskoka, Ontario, and winters in our home in Port St. Lucie, Florida. My wife, Ann, and I, (and our three sons when they can find the time), have been enjoying that “obscurity” for a long time. During that long time we have been fortunate to meet and befriend a large number of Americans, many from Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” One was a military policeman in Tokyo in 1945. After a very successful business carer in the U.S. he’s retired and living the dream. Another American friend, also a member of the “Greatest Generation”, survived The Battle of the Bulge and lived to drink Hitler’s booze at Berchtesgaden in 1945. He too is happily retired and living the dream. Both of these individuals got to where they are by working hard, saving, and living within their means. Both also remember when their Federal Government did the same thing. One of my younger American friends recently sent me a You Tube video, featuring an impassioned speech by Marco Rubio, Republican senator from Florida. In the speech, Rubio blasts the spending habits of his Federal Government and deeply laments his country’s future. He is outraged that the U.S. Government spends three hundred billion dollars, each and every month. He is even more outraged that one hundred and twenty billion of that three hundred billion dollars is borrowed. In other words, Rubio states that for every dollar the U.S. Government spends, forty cents is borrowed. I don’t blame him for being upset. If I had run my business using that arithmetic, I would be in the soup kitchens. If individual American families had applied that arithmetic to their finances, none of them would be in a position to pay a thin dime of taxes.

If there was magic in this world, it happened within sight of the three bases and home plate. All the gems in my world that decorated the walls and floors of dragons' lairs, the sword hilts of privileged princes, and crowns worn by emperors and kings, were nothing compared to the beauty and splendor of the diamond in Wrigley Stadium. It wasn't just a yard with dirt, chalk lines, bases, and a small hill in its center. Wrigley was a field of dreams. Dreams of eternal glory for the men who ran to the outfield, who took their respective bases, and prepared for battle against those who would dare enter their hallowed realm. Dreams for the kids in the stands, all wanting to don a uniform, kiss their moms goodbye, and wield their bats as enchanted weapons destined to knock the cover off the ball. And for the adults who had already selected their lot in life, Wrigley made the dreams of past innocence, lost wonder, and the promise that there was something inherently good still left in the world, come true. Yeah, corny as hell. But all true.

As miserable as Gregor felt about being dumped with a rat, his heart ached for Vikus. He wanted to scream at Luxa, "Say something! Don't let your granpa fly off like this! Four of us aren't coming back!" But the words caught in his throat. Part of him wasn't ready to forgive Vikus for abandoning them, either. "Fly you high, Gregor the Overlander," said Vikus. Gregor struggled with how to respond. Should he ignore Vikus? Let him know that none of them, not even an Overlander, could forgive him? Just as he had steeled himself against replying, Gregor thought of the last two years, seven months, and was it fifteen days now? There were so many things he wished he'd said to his dad when he'd had the chance. Things like how special it was when they went on the roof at night and tried to find the stars. Or how much he loved it when they took the subway out to the stadium to watch a baseball game. Or just that he felt lucky that out of all the people in the world, his dad was his dad. He didn't have room inside him for any more unspoken words. The bats were rising into the air. He only had a second. "Fly you high, Vikus!" he yelled. "Fly you high!" Vikus turned back, and Gregor could see tears shining on his cheeks. He lifted up a hand to Gregor in thanks. And then they were gone.

Stars are everything and nothing that we think they are. They are their own world, but through an act of will we make them part of ours. They are the diamonds of the gods, the lights at a stadium where angels play a midnight game of baseball. They’re fairy farts that have been set ablaze! Mostly, they’re just an untouchable beauty that’s so far away, it’s the only place safe enough to store our secret hopes and dreams. When we see a shooting start, we all make a wish. But what nobody admits is how afraid they are of actually catching something that fell from heaven. I’m not afraid to burn. ~Hadrian

You are the only judge of whether a piece of art is a piece of art! It’s the average man who is the judge. It’s not the effete academic who will determine whether a piece of art is a piece of art anymore than an academic can tell you whether a baseball player is really a great baseball player. It’s the fan in the stadium that will tell you whether he’s a great baseball player.

Rumor had it that during the last home stand, someone had called the stadium ticket office asking what time the game started and was told, “What time can you be here?

If you're wondering what's wrong with Fenway Park in the first place, you're not the only one. Fenway is special precisely because it has what modern stadiums lack: seats that, while often cramped, offer the best views in baseball; and the sense that, if you squint, that could be Smoky Joe Wood pitching to Ty Cobb out there instead of Jeff Fassero and Bobby Higginson.

I don’t know how long we talked about that game the first time my dad showed me the ticket stub. He admitted he hadn’t even been sure that he still had it, that he was surprised when he’d been able to find it. But we’ve spent hours and hours and hours talking about it since. And it’s pretty amazing, because that ticket stub sat in a box for two decades—once it let my dad into a stadium to see a baseball game, and then later, it let me into my dad’s world, into his past, to learn about the man who taught me to love a game so passionately that it shaped nearly every aspect of my life.

You can say, 'Well, if they tore down Fenway Park, we can build a new one.' But you wouldn’t build it right. It’s better to make the accommodations, to save the old ballparks. If Fenway Park needs sky boxes to bring in the poverty-stricken owners enough money to save the stadium before they tear it down and move it someplace else, then build the damn sky boxes. If Wrigley Field needs lights to survive, put up the damn lights.... Make the damn structural improvements, but save the ballpark because when you try to rebuild a cathedral five hundred years too late, it doesn’t come out the same.

The highlight of my baseball career came in Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium when I saw a fan fall out of the upper deck. When he got up and walked away, the crowd booed.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had blue laws that didn’t allow bars to be open on Sunday. No stores were open. It was the day of worship. Even later on when night baseball came in, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Philadelphia Athletics could play baseball at Shibe Park on Sunday only while there was daylight. They weren’t allowed to turn on the stadium lights on Sunday. Many a Sunday game was called on account of darkness.

All he'd ever wanted was for nothing to change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little bit better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, work up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts--whatever you didn't need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little til the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.

Alex stood near Tiger Stadium. It was closed down now and abandoned, a ghost of itself. Alex loved baseball and lamented the new stadiums and their corporate sponsors. Who wanted to watch the almost spiritual game of baseball in a park named after a goddamned financial institution?

It happened to me. And I'll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn't really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there. So I turned to my dad and asked him, "Do you know how many people are here right now"? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I'd learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population. Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don't know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn't true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there's really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn't ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn't I that person? So, that's how I felt till I finished elementary school. And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn't come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I'd let the world know I wasn't a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I've done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.

Loomis, the longest-tenured Time, Inc., employee, still worked at the magazine while I was researching this book, and when I asked her about Cobb, with whom she’d also gone on a second date to an old-timers game at Yankee Stadium, she directed me toward a memoir she’d written in which she described him as “smart and gentlemanly.” He’d been deeply impressed, she said, with her knowledge of baseball.

Of all the baseball stadiums in the world, I like being in Jingu Stadium the best of all. In an infield seat behind first base, or in the right-field bleachers. I love all the sounds, the smells, the way I can sit there, just gazing up at the sky. I love the breeze caressing my skin, I love sipping an ice-cold beer, observing the people around me. Whether the team wins or loses, I love the time spent there most of all. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can— that’s what’s the most valuable.

Of all the baseball stadiums in the world, I like being in Jingu Stadium the best of all. In an infield seat behind first base, or in the right-field bleachers. I love all the sounds, the smells, the way I can sit there, just gazing up at the sky. I love the breeze caressing my skin, I love sipping an ice-cold beer, observing the people around me. Whether the team wins or loses, I love the time spent there most of all. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can— that’s what’s the most valuable." ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory to-day. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-balked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound’s; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher’s mitt, the umpire’s thumb jerked upwards, the clean strike.

The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned: “You okay, Bronk?” Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.” In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

Ned and Mariel arrived at the stadium early, so he had time to relax amid the best artificial environment ever invented, and take in the aura. He knew people who felt that way about places like theaters and church, but to him, those settings were compromised by time and certainty. A play was never going to remove its most prominent actor halfway through act 1 due to ineffectiveness; a preacher would never crush the hopes of his flock and send them home disappointed a couple of Sundays a month. That’s why Ned loved baseball. It might break your heart, but you believed in it anyway. In a life of certainty, he cherished this elective relationship with peril.

I was a kid in Florida, in Sarasota, and the New York Giants trained in Sarasota. When teams would come, we’d stand outside the ballpark, and we would get the balls they hit over the fence during batting practice. We’d sell them to the tourists. And we made a stepladder so we could climb a pine tree out there. That way we could look into the ballpark. The Yanks were in town. I’m out there behind the fence, and I hear this sound. I’d never heard THAT sound off the bat before. Instead of me running to get the ball, I ran up the ladder to see who was hitting it. Well, it was a barrel-chested sucker, with skinny legs, with the best swing I’d ever seen. That was Babe Ruth hitting that ball. Yeah. I don’t hear that sound again until 1938, I’m with the Monarchs, we’re at Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C. We’re upstairs, changing clothes, and the Grays are taking batting practice. I’ve got nothing on but my jock. And I hear that sound. I ran down the runway, ran out on the field, and there’s a pretty black sucker with a big chest and about 34 in the waist, prettiest man I’d ever seen. That was Josh Gibson hitting that ball. And I don’t hear the sound again until I’m a scout with the Cubs. I’m scouting the Royals. When I opened the door to go downstairs, I heard that sound again. I rushed down on the field, and here’s another pretty black sucker hitting that ball. That was Bo Jackson. That’s three times I heard the sound. Three times. But I want to hear it a fourth. I go to the ballpark every day. I want to hear that sound again.

For a hitter, there’s no thrill quite like a late inning, game-changing home run. Unless, that is, the shot is called back. On July 24, 1983, Kansas City superstar George Brett was riding high after hitting a two-out, two-run homer in Yankee Stadium. The future Hall of Famer’s blast changed a 4–3 ninth inning deficit into a 5–4 Royals lead. The joy soon faded, though, when New York manager Billy Martin asked home plate umpire Tim McClelland to inspect Brett’s bat. Earlier in the season, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles had noticed that Brett seemed to use more pine tar than the rules allowed—and Martin had saved that choice information for just such a moment as this. McClelland measured the goo on Brett’s bat, finding it exceeded the eighteen inches allowed. Brett was called out, erasing the home run and giving the Yankees a 4–3 victory. The Royals were incensed by the ruling, which was later overturned by American League president Lee McPhail, who said “games should be won and lost on the playing field—not through technicalities of the rules.” Baseball’s official acknowledgment of the “bigger picture” is reminiscent of Jesus’ approach to God’s laws. Arguing with hypocritical Pharisees, Jesus once said, “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). Our concern for the letter of the law should be balanced by an equal concern for the spirit of the law. If you’re inclined to spiritual pickiness, don’t forget the “more important matters.

11: Marilyn and DiMaggio attend an opening day baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Marilyn is photographed watching the action.

I love the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team for many reasons and they have given me some wonderful memories. When I look back, I don't think about the games they lost but I remember going to see the games when I was a little boy with my grandfather. I remember talking to my mom on the phone after the Cardinals won the World Series in 2006 while I was dressed up in my Captain of the Fallopian Swim Team Halloween costume. I remember taking my lovely wife to her first Cardinals game where she broke out in hives due to the heat and humidity. I remember the joy I felt as I sat with my little man watching our first Cardinals game together at Busch Stadium. I know I need to take my obsession down a notch but in the end it is worth it because it takes me back to times I will never forget and always cherish.

My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem. "I want to go home now," I tell my father. He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says. Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K." And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.

I remember attending a Friars roast for Muhammad Ali when Don Rickles grabbed me and walked me up to Sinatra. “Hey, Frank,” he said to the Chairman of the Board, “tonight I’m sitting with this guy. You know why? Because he fills up baseball stadiums! You play bars.” Frank laughed and waved him off, with me standing there silently. Soon

Power looked like Maseratis parked in the season-ticket-holder spots at football games and familiar names on the baseball stadium. It looked like Dr. John Garvey, celebrity

No state in America has taken more aggressive action to reduce the public’s exposure to chemicals, and to secondhand smoke, than California. California banned the sale of flavored tobacco, because it appeals to children, and the use of smokeless tobacco in the state’s five professional baseball stadiums. It prohibited the use of e-cigarettes in government and private workplaces, restaurants, bars, and casinos. San Francisco in late 2020 banned cigarette smoking in apartments.8 In the fall of 2020, California outlawed companies from using in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal care products twenty-four chemicals it had deemed dangerous.9 And yet breathing secondhand smoke and being exposed to trace chemicals in your shampoo are hardly sufficient to kill. By contrast, hard drug use is both a necessary and sufficient cause to kill, as the 93,000 overdose and drug poisoning deaths of 2020 show. And yet, where the governments of San Francisco, California, and other progressive cities and states stress the remote dangers of cosmetics, pesticides, and secondhand smoke, they downplay the immediate dangers of hard drugs including fentanyl. In 2020, San Francisco even paid for two billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and fentanyl, which had been created by the Harm Reduction Coalition. The first had a picture of an older African American man smiling. The headline read, “Change it up. Injecting drugs has the highest risk of overdose, so consider snorting or smoking instead.” The second billboard’s photograph was of a racially diverse group of people at a party smiling and laughing. The headline read, “Try not to use alone. Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns.”10 When I asked Kristen Marshall of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which oversees San Francisco’s overdose prevention strategy, about the threat posed by fentanyl, she said, “People use it safely all the time. This narrative that gets it labeled as an insane poison where you touch it and die—that’s not how drugs work. It’s not cyanide. It’s not uranium. It’s just a synthetic opioid, but one that’s on an unregulated market.

Subway Series is a series of baseball games between two New York City teams, since fans can reach the stadiums via subway trains. The first Subway Series were played as World Series games. For example, the Yankees played the New York Giants in 1921, and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941. More recently, the Mets and the Yankees have been playing Subway Series games during the regular season. They typically play groups of two or three games at each team’s stadium. The Mets and the Yankees competed in a World Series Subway Series in 2000, and the Yankees won in five games.

If the Cubs win the World Series, the playing of the sport must be discontinued. The leagues disbanded, the players sent home, the stadiums destroyed. Professional baseball really began with the team that became the Cubs. Early in the twentieth century, that team won and won and won and then, for whatever reason, stopped winning. They set of on a 108-year trek through the wilderness, plumbed the depths of defeat, then somehow found their way back. 2016 was 1908 all over again. The historic arc of the game could finally be recognized. It's a story that begins and ends in Chicago. If they won Game 7, that story would reach its obvious conclusion. Disband and go home. Anything beyond this point is postscript.

You realize that the sleeping stadium is more beautiful at night, with the unshakable quietus rooting it to the earth. It rests like a graveyard--empty but throbbing all at once. With the pollution of light extinguished, maybe you even see the Dog Star blinking back at you.

During a break in the action, the kiss cam focuses on Cole and little miss hair flip. She laughs and bats her eyelashes, turning toward him, and I clench my teeth. “Oh, hell no,” I mutter, leaning over and taking his face between my hands, kissing him right there in front of an entire baseball stadium full of people. I can feel the curve of a smile on his lips as our mouths press together, a few people in the row ahead of us letting out a cheer.

Baseball is just a game. But like religion, it has rituals. I need rituals. I need traditions. I need something to believe in, whether I worship in a church or a stadium. I believe in the Yankees and then divorced them and came all the way back to believing in them again, and what I have learned, if anything, is this: My belief, my faith, transcends individual players and is deeper than the outcome of any game, any season. It is unshakable.

Speaking of baseball, a small group of Nautilus crew members arrived during a game at Yankee Stadium. Even though the famous slugger Mickey Mantle was at bat, the crowd stood and gave the submariners a standing ovation.

One afternoon, in the suffocating damp heat of a Washington summer, I was taken to learn about the American game of baseball. The game remained something of a mystery to me, but I learned more about the actual separation between the white and black races. In the stadium I and my white escort were seated on the side reserved for whites, and on the opposite side of the stadium were seats for the blacks, of whom there were many more than the whites. In buses, too, separation of the races was strictly enforced, with whites at the front and blacks at the back. The public toilets were strictly separate. No Afro-American would think of entering a hotel or restaurant frequented by whites; the division was absolute. Blacks had their own eating and sleeping places. And of course, all schools were segregated. There was nothing like this in Baghdad. While there were very few black students in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools, they were treated just like the rest of us and many real friendships developed between the two. This easy relationship existed although it had been only a few years since Ottoman days, when Iraqis were able to buy black slaves openly, a practice that was banned when the British army arrived in 1917. Yet here in the United States, the Land of Liberty and Equality, at least in the southern states, no white man could sit down in a restaurant and have a meal with a black friend. Though this discrimination no longer existed legally, it was clearly still in practice in the nation’s capitol.

In February of 1921, the Yankees purchased 10 acres of property from the estate of William Waldorf Astoria at 161st St and River Ave in the west Bronx, directly across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds. Yankees owner Rupert and Tillinghast Huston announced the construction of baseball's first triple-decked structure. With a capacity of over 70,000, it would also be the first structure to be called a "stadium.

Sports wagering is now legal in almost every state. In some cities, baseball fans can place bets on the game at kiosks at the stadium. In most states, people can wager with the flick of their fingers on their phones while they cheer from the cheap seats or from just behind the dugout, and baseball, once opposed to gambling in all its formats,