| Joy in Mudville, Denver, and Durango |
| On a crystal-clear Arizona day in March 1994, baseball reporter Jerome Holtzman reminisced about his thirty-seven years on the beat. A Cactus League game loomed an hour away, and from the home team dugout he spoke of his love for baseball: "I've almost become a protector of baseball. Although baseball needs no protector. I mean, all these sportswriters you know argue about football and other sports, but baseball is the best sport of all.... I like it. I like to watch it. Each game is different. If people say to you, well, that it's a dull game, or they have seen a dull game, they just haven't been watching the game. They don't know what's going on." |
| This Hall of Fame sportswriter could imagine no better job, even if he had been covering the Chicago White Sox and Cubs during some lean years for both teams. "I'm really happiest when I'm at the ballpark, I really am." |
| Arnie Harris, award-winning WGN television director, watches and works nearly 160 games each year. "I love baseball. I think baseball is really a director's sport because, one, there's so much happening when the ball is in play and, two, conversely, there's so much not happening between pitches. It's really an artistic sport." Baseball, Harris concluded, "is such a unique sport. I think baseball is healthy as hell. They've got problems, sure, the salary thing is going out of sight, but it's not only baseball." Trials and tribulations, joys and successesbaseball has seen them all since the beginning. |
| To the baseball fan no better sport exists. It has a way of settling into one's life and never leaving. It can be as comfortable as an old glove or as aggravating as a stone in a player's spikes. Joy does not always come to Mudville, as the fans of the immortal Casey found out when he struck out in the ninth inning. The late commissioner of baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, remarked: "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again,... You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops." |
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