<strong><em>"People will come. The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come. People will most definitely come."
-- TERRENCE MANN in "Field of Dreams"</em></strong>

I'm really not sure that there is anything better about America -- anything that has lasted across the centuries, from one America to another to another and another -- than baseball and the feelings so many people have for it.

I'm not sure why, but I'm a lot more likely to divide the world into people who love baseball and bad people than into liberals and conservatives. Someone can be totally opposed to me politically, but if they love baseball, I have a hard time thinking too badly of them. As much as I disliked George W. Bush's politics, they fact that he had once said his real dream job was to be commissioner of baseball was definitely a point in his favor.

There isn't anything that connects the generations -- fathers and sons -- more effectively. At the height of the Sixties, when my father and I couldn't talk about much without disagreeing, we could usually talk about baseball. My earliest memories of my dad were of baseball games at Crosley Field in Cincinnati and Yankee Stadium in New York, and my most wonderful memories of my own son are of the four years I coached him in youth league baseball.

We had some wonderful times and some other times when I found myself embarrassed at my own actions. In our final season, when we lost every game, we were trying to protect a small lead in one of our last games. The bases were loaded and the batter hit a line-drive into the gap in left-center. The center fielder moved over and cut the ball off, but he froze on where to throw the ball and before he threw it, all four runners had scored.

<em>"What are you, brain dead?"</em>

That was what the most laid-back coach in the league yelled -- at his own son.

[caption id="attachment_1778" align="alignleft" width="259" caption="Fathers and sons, Field of Dreams"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/images-1.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1778" title="images (1)" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/images-1.jpg" alt="" width="259" height="194" /></a>[/caption]

But Virgile understood. Back then, although I don't think he loved baseball as much as I did, he seemed to get it. We went to a number of ballgames together in Los Angeles and Anaheim. When he was 8 years old, we skipped school and went to the Angels' home opener. When he was 9, in only the second game he ever attended, we saw the Braves' Kent Mercker pitch a no-hitter against the Dodgers.

Maybe my favorite time with him was in 2001, when I got to do something for the very first time at age 51 -- sit in the very first row of box seats on the third base side just past the Dodgers' dugout. I had been going to ballgames for more than 40 years without ever having a foul ball hit to me, but on this day, Virgile got three in the first five innings.

My son's interest in baseball has faded. The whole steroid thing bothered him a lot, and he has become an outstanding performer in Ironman Triathlons. We have still managed to go to an occasional ballgame together, and it wouldn't surprise me if someday we got out our old gloves and played catch one more time.

I forget where I wrote this -- maybe on Facebook -- but describing the things that really matter in the world to me, I said that I love my family, I love my friends and I love baseball.

That's me.

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