Baseball, played in a minor key.

Better writers have touched on baseball, in ways more serene and profound than I ever could manage.  But I think there are special elegies that should go out to minor league baseball, in this day and age.   You sit there and can pretty easily imagine a crisp spring day of a hundred, a hundred and thirty — think about that — years ago, in small places spread out across this spacious land, where it way some kind of miracle how a tradition like baseball could still stay forever local, where it and all its trappings were something you could nod at, get a smile or a nod back from, because everybody knew the game belonged to your town, your people.

K and me at the game; the Kane County Cougars, just up the road from Fermilab in the deep western suburbs of Chicago, halfway to the corn.