I love baseball because of what it is: a great sport, easily understood yet as complex as you want to make it. It has been America's greatest common denominator, and it can continue to be so, because so many Latinos/Hispanics (which ever title a person prefers) play it and follow it. More than 50 percent of the minor leaguers this season were born in Latin America. Baseball is a common thread for cultures and for politics. I love to talk about and argue baseball with those with whom I disagree -- often vehemently -- on politics. I am often aghast at George F. Wills' columns (as well written as they are), but I have to respect his knowledge and love for the game. Anyone who calls himself a serious fan has to have read  "Men at Work,'' Wills' outstanding baseball book. By the same token, "October '64'' by David Halberstam is a must-read about the end of the Yankee dynasty.  There is much outstanding American literature in which baseball plays an integral part. The game lends itself to this: One-on-one battles between pitcher and hitter; outstanding individual game-saving plays, yet over the course of a season, it really takes a team effort.
    And then, there's the continuity of the records that allows you to compare Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth to today's players. That adds to the aura: How hard it is on a given night to see something that's never been done before, and yet it can happen. For example, Mark Whitten, an obscure player in an otherwise meaningless game, hitting four home runs and driving in 12 runs. Nobody had ever done that, together, before, but there it was.
  Or Tom Cheney, '62 Washington Senators, at a time when the single-game strikeout record for a pitcher was 18, setting down 21 Oriole batters on strikes -- while pitching 16 innings. Despite Roger Clemens and Kerry Wood, Cheney, now deceased, still holds the single-game strikeout record, but it's almost certain that nobody will ever pitch 16 inning again.