Baseball Is The Greatest Game is a thesis proving that baseball is our greatest game and should be regarded as our only National Pastime. Besides being a pastoral game of great beauty-a double play is like ballet, the most graceful thing to watch in any team sport- baseball is attendant to our culture and history like no other. It matches the seasons and rhythms of our lives, coming to us each year with our rising hopes in the spring and leaving us as we retreat into the cold certainty of fall. Like no other sport, baseball has drawn the affections of our finest writers. Besides noted baseball scribes Roger Angel, Roger Kahn, and Thomas Boswell, celebrated authors like Barnard Malamud, Phillip Roth, and W.P. Kinsella have been inspired to write works of fiction about baseball that belong on the bookshelves of great literature. Baseball doesn't forget its past. It comes back to us over and over on a timeless continuum that allows us to admire and compare the game's present heroes and their accomplishments with all who have gone on before. Most of all, baseball is fun.