Hmm. I’m less sure about this. Think of all the great players from the Caribbean, Florida, California, Mexico, even Texas.

I think there’s something specifically agrarian about baseball. It’s not about temperature as much as it is planting and reaping season. So you can be a great baseball player from southern California, but it helps if you probably spent some time in orchards or vineyards there.

Football is different; it doesn’t thrive in cities, but doesn’t die there either. Basketball is either urban or hyper-rural. If you grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb and aren’t Shane Battier, you’re probably not going pro.

Other top sports that follow baseball’s season: tennis and golf. But maybe because they’re individual rather than team sports, they don’t have quite the same feel. The closest you get is in the attachment to the specific events: the Masters, the US Open, Wimbledon. You can be a Wimbledon fan like you can be a Mets fan. You can root for players and follow their careers, but they aren’t rooted to a place, and neither are your affections.

Thanks for the kind words, Adam.

I think you’re right — baseball is so Midwest. It really follows the harvest cycle of seasons from spring to fall, and more than any other sport, spans the majority of the year. Part if that, as well, I’d argue, is that unlike with hockey (which also has a long season), we SEE the seasons change around the game because so many ballparks are open air.

Makes me want to listen to “Harvest” now, too.

I would argue, as far as we can take it, that not does the baseball season respond to the rhythm of the seasons, but that the game itself is more rhythmic than any other major sport. That natural ebb and flow (which Tim seems to want to resist, but he’s right) is why baseball is properly played in the Northeast and Midwest, where seasons are pronounced and people have to live by them.

Baseball’s the only sport that perfectly follows the seasons this way. Even the Olympics, which are the main once-every-four-years competitor for summer attention, start late and end early.

It’s so much stranger to be on the calendar of the school year — or for that matter, the NBA, NHL, or NFL. Summer’s a chaotic release, a revolutionary interregnum.

Everything feels more tense: Will I get a job? Will I like my teacher? Who will the ____ draft? Will our star ____ hold out / get traded / leave via free agency / get caught with drugs/ get in a gunfight? / get caught with a dogfight? Cataclysm is around the corner at every turn.

It ratchets its way forward — the time of modernity, fiscal years, election cycles. Only baseball is always a return, a renewal, to a time that’s always growing yet somehow the same.

(And I hate this touchy-feely postmodern roots-of-nature crap, so think of how much I hate AVG and the MLB for making me write it.)

I’m pretty sure I’m happier now than I would have been with a PhD (and likely, no job + insane debt). Fifth grade, well, maybe I should have tried harder in college. As far as being neighbors with Izzo, that’ll happen if someone decides to grant me the MacArthur Genius grant to muse about baseball all day long or some such nonsense. Otherwise, it’s unlikely we ever end up there, or in the homes I ogle in Birmingham.

Yet all that seems much easier to accept, and I am much happier with it, than the permanent melancholy that comes from the end of baseball.

All things I’m ready to take on now, haha. You there, too?