America's National Pastime is the once deeply pure and widely beloved, and now often cynically regarded and business oriented business of baseball. Once a sport and a game, it is now very clearly dominated by a corporate identity, with enormous wage figures and heavy advertising stakes rendering baseball a crass shadow of its former self. Indeed, with the revelations of major steroid abuse in the sport across the last decade and a half, it is challenging to look at the sport as though its reputation has not been drastically tarnished. Indeed, it has been, with the disillusioning impact of this realization that many of our most cherished heroes have for all intents and purposes cheated their collective way to the top of the record books, quite impossible to return to the pristine impressions of the ballgame that tie it into the trappings of classic America. In two works on the subject of America's deep and sentimental relationship with baseball, we are presented with the mythology of the National Pastime as it is perpetuated from generation to generation. In literary examples alone, the legacy of baseball as a forum for fathers and sons to relate, old friends to come together, families to take an occasion together and for the construction of American iconography to be posited, still survives. Michael Shaara's novel, For the Love of the Game and the David Evans, directed film, The Sandlot, together form a two-sided dialogue constituting portraiture of baseball as an idealized context for the realization of the purist of competitive desires, even as it is beset by modern challenges to its legacy.
             At the outset, it is appropriate and fair to acknowledge, with no small degree of affection for the subject matter, that baseball is ideal fare for American corniness. That is to say that there is an opportunity both in the unscripted play on the field and the in the aesthetic approach taken by those who have tended to lionize it in art,...