baseball

occupation / innovator as

American football player

nationality

American

is at once the most natural and pastoral of sports and also the most artificial, its park lands set down with surreal unnaturalness in the urban landscape.

I call it tendentiously conceived (although certainly Oriard is not alone in this tendentiousness) because if the nature of America is to be various, then a pure and original center is an artificial imposition just as if the nature of America is urban (in another common confrontation of the same problem), then baseball as the most natural and pastoral of sports, is also the most artificial, its park lands set down with surreal unnaturalness in the urban landscape. In the common formulations of fiction, baseball teams, which coalesce as organic families of men within larger communities of disparate, diverse, alienated individuals, are an analogous kind of artificially natural solution to America conceived of as problematically disparate.

Michael Oriard

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Michael Oriard