THE GAME PEOPLE

THIS IS MY FAVORITE BASEBALL photograph. You are there as the local Dartmouth College nine plays Harvard on the Green in 1882.

Looking like an early plan for our national capital, this remarkable photo is baseball for me—an intersection of community, time, location, and hope. I imagine the photographer sticking his bulky machine out the window of a College building to record this moment in much the same way a daydreaming student might be wafted out and down to the play going on a million miles from his classroom.

"Baseball," the poet Donald Hall told us in a filmed interview for our documentary series, "because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers." I can think of nothing in our daily life that offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime. And to me, this photograph says it all. And more. I wonder what the score is.

excerpted fromAmerican Heritage magazine