The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.

I'm not really sure why, but baseball remains America's sport. Not necessarily the sport of modern America but certainly the sport of the historical, idealized, remembered America. And it is because of this that essays such as this one on the passage of Al Lopez - the oldest living Hall of Famer - have such emotional impact.

We lament the passing of such an evocative era because in some part of our hearts and minds, the modern world isn't quite what the older one was. The glow of the ballplayers has been diminished somewhat as we've come to see them as actual, fallible humans. The grass isn't quite as green as we remember it from our youth - or even from the stories of our fathers' youths. The giants of the age don't stand quite so tall now that we know their predilections and peccadillos.

James Earl Jones said it (warning: wav file) - in character - in Field of Dreams.

WP Kinsella has written it a half dozen times - most beautifully in my eyes in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

A few years back - probably ten years now - Keith Olbermann published another essay that dealt to some extent with this same theme. I can't find it still on the web anywhere, but I've got a pdf version, thankfully.