Modern baseball players make huge amounts of money for “playing a kids’ game.” Those multi-million dollar, multi-year contracts we read about happen in part because their agents have succeeded in persuading team owners that ballplayers are “entertainers”; since nobody complains about how much TV and movie stars make, it’s therefore O.K. for a guy who hits .280 and drives in 70 runs a year to make $3 million for surviving a seven-month baseball season.

I don’t agree with the money argument. But the player agents aren’t altogether wrong. Ballplayers are like movie stars in that they captivate young fans (and others who want to pretend they’re young). Go to any ballpark today and you’ll find 45-year-old men wearing sweatshirts bearing the names of players young enough to be their own sons … in a kind of tail-wagging-the-dog bastardization of normal parental hero worship. Schoolteachers who make $50,000 a year have far more to say about a child’s development than any baseball player does, but when was the last time you saw a kid (or his father) wearing a shirt with some teacher’s name on it? Ballplayers are celebrities, which is close to saying they’re entertainers.

There’s something mystical about baseball. The drama that plays out on a green diamond at the base of a triple-decked amphitheater somehow elevates the players (performers?) beyond levels that their playing skills and characters warrant. This is analogous to the vicarious reaction actors and actresses on a movie screen evoke from a moviegoer, independently of their acting ability. Adulation supersedes objectivity. That’s what this book is about … that, and about how baseball, for good or ill, has become a metaphor for evolving societal standards.

As a test of my own memory, I’m attempting all this without referring to a single record book, the Internet or other any information source. Don’t look for footnotes or a bibliography. It’s all from “upstairs.” If anyone mentioned in the book is slighted because my memory failed, I offer sincere apologies in advance.