The Beauty of the Written Word

Have you ever coughed so much and so hard that you literally thought your head was going to explode? That is how I've been feeling for the past several days. Everyone please pity me.


On a separate note, I think one of the reasons I love baseball so much is that it brings with it one of my favorite kinds of people, the baseball beat writer. These men (and the occasional woman) are true poets of sports writing.

They follow the team around and create prose that can make you weep, such as this excerpt from a Bryan Burwell article in the Post Dispatch describing the joy of seeing a healed ace back on the mound:

Since sweet dreams really are supposed to be made of this — jaw-dropping and outrageous and perfect beyond your wildest imaginations — then surely this was the epitome of Tony La Russa's sweetest baseball dream in many years. The manager stood there in the drizzle on the top steps of the Cardinals dugout on this gloomy Thursday afternoon at Busch Stadium, mesmerized by this absolute thing of baseball beauty:

Chris Carpenter was out there on the hill again, tossing all these precise darts between the raindrops, buckling knees and painting the plate, doing the impressive things that aces always do.

That is just plain pretty. And I do love pretty writing, especially when it's applied to something manly.

Just so you have an accurate look inside my brain, I completely imagine all baseball beat writers as 1920s journalists complete with "press" hats and suspenders. It just makes it more fun.

Let us be for real, baseball is beautiful. Not only are these word-smiths vomitting out this beautiful prose for newspapers everyday, but Walt Whitman himself wrote about baseball in Leaves of Grass:

I see great things in baseball. It's our game--the American game. It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.

Word up, Walt.

Long story short, intelligent people love baseball.