A Golden Age

Our lead story today happens to be my panegyric about the current state of baseball, found in the Daily Beast. I believe we are living in a Golden Age. 

An under-remarked quality also distinguishes baseball and sports in general from our other national obsessions. After the game is played, we all agree on the facts. Every reporter and fan walks away from a game knowing the score and agreeing on the number of hits. Fans of a losing team are not made to feel less American, or less dignified than the winners. We do not suspect that this game and its players are destroying the American way of life.

For a long time as a political reporter and opinion journalist, I looked sideways at sports-writing. So inconsequential, so trivial. (Wherever did I get the idea that political writing was usually of great merit?) But for the past few years, and against my own expectations for my life, sports have become more important to me: as a refuge from strife, as a preserve of human excellence in a culture that revels in mediocrity, as a place to reconnect with my friends who would otherwise drift away as their lives diverge from my own.

As you can see, this also gets at why I decided to launch The Slurve.