OCR Text |
Show THE BASEBALL DRAMA The teams of the major baseball leagues have been practising for some weeks, and the grand race for the 1941 championships is beginning. If some foreign traveler wished to give a complete picture of our country, he should attend some of these ball games. If he observes the marvellous skill which the players have developed, notes the roaring of the crowd, the sorrow felt by the losers and the joy of the winners, he will have learned many things about America. Social, economic, and business life is rapidly changing chang-ing in the United States, but some things come fairly near being fixed. One of these is the great national game of baseball. In minor details the game changes from one decade to the next, but the mam idea keeps on about the same from year to year. In the minds of many, a ball game between the most skilled professionals is about the most highly developed de-veloped form of sport. The- players devote themselves to it so consistantly over a period of years, that they attain a perfection of skill comparable to some world famous musician who can perform miracles on his instrument. in-strument. This physical skill has to be so directed by generalship, the power of quick thought and effective planning that it is a contest of brains as well as trained train-ed muscles. So the spectators- crowd into the grandstands by the thousands and often tens of thousands, facinated by a marvellous contest of muscles, cordination, agility, agil-ity, self control, and brain power. The thing is so complex com-plex that people are left to guess at many of the points of inner strategy. One can expect that a sport that has been developed to such perfection will not probably prob-ably be played very differently when the year 2000 dawns on the world. |