Do They Play Baseball in Heaven?

In the film version of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural (such a different story on screen – and such a silly movie), comeback hero Roy Hobbes says:

“I love baseball.”

It’s a simple, declarative sentence, and one that probably made lots of moviegoers yawn: Yeah, so? I love pizza. But for those of us who played the game as kids and have followed it ever since, that bit of dialog saved the movie. It’s a religious moment: Hobbes’s statement is like the preamble to a Creed.