you won’t be reading any memorable essays about the arizona cardinals

I’m not sure if it’s a consensus, but a lot of people will tell you baseball is boring.

Just as many say they find reading a book taxing.

Neither provides instant gratification, like football or a Bond flick.

So I guess it’s natural that baseball has often served as muse for great writers. Take this this classic essay by the late John Updike:

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.