The social practices of one generation tend to get 
codified into the “game” of the next. Finally, the game is 
passed on as a joke, like a skeleton stripped of its flesh. This is 
especially true of periods of suddenly altered attitudes, 
resulting from some radically new technology. It is the inclusive 
mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while, at 
least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a game of one-
thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist 
jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with 
its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management 
organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and 
participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified 
awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from 
the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional 
stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had 
become the elegant abstract image of an industrial society