Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance - thrown hard and with precision.
Interpretation
The quote celebrates the beauty and design of a baseball as a perfect object for its intended use.
Roger Angell's quote highlights the intrinsic beauty and functional design of a baseball, suggesting that its compact form embodies utility and perfection. He implies that the baseball, in its simplicity, serves a clear purpose and represents a harmonious blend of art and function that resonates deeply with the physical experience of playing the game.
In practice
During a sportsmanship speech, to emphasize the beauty of the game.
This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions.
Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.
Friends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television close-up of Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face β¦. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all.
I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.
For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.
Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.
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