#paul sample

MWW Artwork of the Day (4/12/16)
Paul Sample (American, 1896-1974)
Sand Lot Ball Game (1938)
Oil on canvas
Arkell Museum, Canajoharie NY (Gift of Bartlett Arkell)

Spring is definitely here and summer beckons, the sun is shining, there’s finally some warmth in the air, and professional baseball leagues all over the globe are getting into full swing: time for all red-blooded boys and girls to dust off the mitts, grab a bat, and head to the sandlots.  Baseball, like Hope, springs eternal.

Future historians may well decide that baseball was America’s greatest contribution to world culture.  As the great American poet (and baseball fan) Walt Whitman observed when the game was still in its infancy: “[Baseball] — it’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere —- belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”

But the most memorable oration about the Great American Game remains this:

“I don’t have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball.  America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked time with America as it has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers. It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables,  It continually reminds us of what once was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again.”  – J.D Salinger in Ray Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe,” p. 213. [but hear the wonderfully deep and melodic voice of James Earl Jones as Terence Mann in the film adaptation “Field of Dreams”]

* The Museum Without Walls also has a special collection of baseball photos, with accompanying original essays on the history and characters of the game: