Rawls on the Grand Game

In this letter from eminent philosopher John Rawls to Owen Fiss, Rawls recounts a conversation with legal scholar Harry Kalven about the reasons for baseball's superiority. They're familiar to any fan, but they're presented concisely and elegantly here, like this:

The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise.

And this, which actually hadn't occurred to me in quite this way:

...baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time. Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball and throws it to home plate, and so on.

Coincidentally, I was in the middle of drafting another post that briefly references Rawls when I came upon this. Should be up in the next day or two.

(Via Crooked Timber)