Sometimes sports is a pleasant diversion and a way of burning off energy competitively but not destructively. And baseball has its own parallels to life.

George Will was an old fashioned "conservative" journalist and widely syndicated columnist. He loved the comforting repetitive rhythm of the sport of professional baseball. At one point, Yale Professor Donald Kagan (a neo-conservative historian) called Will "democratically modern" because Will cited baseball's equal accessibility to aristocrats and to the masses as particularly virtuous. Will replied pointedly: "I have been called many things, but rarely, if ever, democrat or modern. This mudslinging must cease."