Reflection for September 8

There is a long and often ridiculous history of comparing baseball to a religion. Rule-bound, slow to change, cyclic, and timeless; an assembly of people presided over by men in funny outfits, who say what is safe and what is out; a space sealed-off from the rest of society, yet definitional to a national culture: the comparisons aren’t too difficult to make….

Religious phenomena have plenty of overlaps with other products of human culture, but the whole game of “but is it a religion?” is obnoxious at best. None of which changes the fact that, when Major League Baseball announced last week that it was planning to introduce instant replay to games, thereby allowing umpires to stop play after a difficult call and watch the whole thing again in slow-motion, all I could think, with a tinge of sadness, was that a new, especially virulent kind of fundamentalism had arrived in America’s First Church (Michael Schulson, “Baseball Literalism,” Killing the Buddha).