The Boston Review posted a letter by John Rawls extolling six virtues of baseball.

Fourth: all plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul. There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from the marvelous timing built into the game and not from trying to police cheaters etc.

The comments are also pretty great.

It seems impossible for an intelligent English person to enter a discussion about baseball and discuss baseball. Instead, they need desperately to impose on the matter a discussion of the superiority of cricket inevitably written in overwrought prose. For one, I say let them have their say and their attempt to bore my American soul to death. Brought to you by the same people who gaves us fox hunting as a sport.

via kottke.org