My essay “Baseball: An appréciation”
is, in my humble opinion, up there with some of the best writings done on the sport.
To anyone who accuses me of boasting, I would say: Show me a better piece.
It has not gotten much readership. I submitted it to a couple of journals for publication without success. Recently, I started to try to get it in the hands of some well known sportswriters.
I have proofread and polished it many times, and think I have perfected it. Yet today, an inspiration for a slight addition came to me in a “tactile” fashion.
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I was walking in a local park. A man and a boy who looked to be a teenager were engaged in a batting practice session, the coronavirus epidemic notwithstanding.
The boy could hit! There was a screen behind him. With each pitch, he coiled himself and swung, and would launch a ball into the air that seemed to get lost. I could sense the adult, who was pitching, sort of sucking his breath in in admiration. A kid in the outfield was giving chase.
The boy had a metal bat. It was so satisfying to hear the ping each time he connected.
Right then and there, I changed the following paragraph in my baseball essay, adding the words in italics:
A baseball. The ball itself. Holding one in your hand. Idly tossing it. The shininess and hardness. The stitching. The delight of boys in having a new, white, shiny, unscuffed ball. The crack of a wooden bat (or the ping of a metal one) connecting with a ball and sending a fly well past the infield.
An auditory experience — something experiential and non-verbal — led to this tweaking of my piece.
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Writers derive inspiration from all sorts of places: things thought about, read, conversation, experience, and minute observation.
— Roger W. Smith
March 26, 2020
Roger's rhetoric 