The legends of pastoral fields. The detailed history and meticulous attention to continuity. The sight of kids playing ball. The hush that descends when you walk into the Hall of Fame. Each implicitly casts the universe of baseball as a magical land that touches, but maybe isn't precisely part of, the "real" world in which we live. "The whole history of baseball," the writer Bernard Malamud once said, "has the quality of mythology."
Since the game's early days, that mythology has been constructed - often deliberately - to set itself apart. But sometimes things happen that demonstrate otherwise, and reality pokes through.
One of those things unfolded this week when Commissioner Rob Manfred decided that permanent bans from baseball expire upon the death of the banned player. In a single moment, he changed the possible posthumous career trajectory of two preposterously talented ballplayers - Pete Rose and "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, one banned for decades for gambling on baseball, the other for more than a century for abetting gamblers. Each is now eligible for the Hall of Fame.
Some welcomed it. "A great day for baseball," said Rose's Philadelphia Phillies teammate, Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt. Others chose the online equivalent of spitting disgustedly on the ground. "A very dark day for baseball," said Marcus Giamatti, son of the late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, who banned Rose in 1989. On social media, many wondered whether Manfred had responded to President Donald Trump's stated desire that Rose be reinstated.
The reality, though, is this: No matter what you think of Manfred's decision, baseball and the larger world around it collide far more often than the purists might wish - and have since the game's early decades.