I think baseball is conducive to fiction writing because of its open-endedness. The other sports, football, basketball, hockey, are twice-enclosed; first by time limits and then by rigid playing boundaries. In contrast, there's no time limit on a baseball game, and the true baseball field has foul lines which diverge forever, eventually taking in a good part of the universe; and that makes for myth and larger-than-life characters, and that's what a fiction writer is looking for. That's my canned answer that I give whenever somebody asks me why so many writers write about baseball. I don't think I ever do an interview that I don't get to make that little spiel.