The old ballgame is enjoyable to write about because it's a storyteller's delight. By now it's created its own unique universe with its own mythology and folklore, its own deity (Babe Ruth), its own Lucifers (the Black Sox), and so on. It's an insulated universe, seemingly immune to what goes on around it...world wars, a Depression. The goddamned game just goes on and on, popping up again every spring, maddeningly irresistible. It's like some good old reassurance from childhood, a talisman we carry with us. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to write about. So I did.