To play baseball is to become part of the game. One need not be a megabuck star to live baseball as a participant, to figure into its geometry and its drama. The friendly exertions of amateur play lie at the heart of the sport, comprising the wellspring of its professional levels.
Here viewed as a pastime through the eyes of a lifelong amateur player, baseball unfolds as an experience of motion and time and senses--the work of muscle, the textures of wood and leather, the warmth of sun, the scents of a grassy field. In the timeless continuity of the game can be glimpsed part of baseball's singular appeal: the lively tension between the momentary and the eternal, what is over and what is never over. The interwoven essays making up Bushville are a poignant reflection upon the pursuit of what is essentially a ball, but what is crucially human as well.