Of the major American spectator sports, the game of baseball is probably the most "intellectual." By this I do not mean that the average baseball fan is a metaphysician or a college professor, since the truth is that as such things go, baseball probably draws more of its adherents from blue-collar segments of the population than either football or basketball and certainly far more than golf, tennis, or track and field. Only boxing appeals to a less educated audience than baseball, and boxing, except for certain televised productions, is now all but defunct on the professional level, while as a school sport it has been abandoned entirely.

By the "intellectuality" of baseball I mean rather that it offers a formidable dimension of fan involvement that can be entered into quite independently of either sitting in a stadium to watch a game or observing it on television. Of the major sports it is by far the most statistical and measurable. In part this is because of the absence of muscle-against-muscle brute contact, and in part because by about the year 1900 the game attained pretty much its ultimate form, so that there are now available some 80 years of statistical data that can be compared, contrasted, and otherwise disputed in meaningful fashion.

To cite an obvious example, in the spring of 1974 millions of persons were engaged in following a home run duel between a player on the Atlanta Braves and another who had been dead for more than a quarter-century, and whose career had come to an end 13 years before that. Entering the 1974 season, Henry Aaron had hit 713 lifetime major league home runs. The legendary Babe Ruth's record of 714, established