Baseball: Practices for Coming Home

American culture can be understood as a conflict between the values of the oblong games and the values of baseball. Wallace Stegner observes that the American West was settled by two kinds of people, boomers and stickers. Boomers aim to conquer the land, to “pillage and run,” to win. They follow the narrative enacted by the oblong games. Stickers, however, cherish their homes; they “love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” Stegner hoped that eventually, these two types “will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health” to their homes. This is the compromise that baseball embodies as each batter leaves home only in order to strive to return safely. It is perhaps significant that Stegner’s father, the quintessential Western boomer, “tried professional baseball but wasn’t quite good enough.”