A man who fails seven out of ten times is hailed a hero.  How can this be?  Don't we see failure as a weakness?  Our society seeks perfection and completness.  With more failure than success why is baseball America's game.  It doesn't fit what America is about if you compare it with everthing else in our fabric.  That's why it is still around.  It takes us from the perfection driven grind we face daily.  A ballgame is like a daydream.  We are not sleeping but we have let ourselves go to that place only each one of us knows intimately.  Our childhood, our parents, good friends.  Whatever or whenever that place may be, baseball takes us there.  In that place far within do we see failure seven out of ten times? Or do we see grass and sod.  Peanuts and popcorn.  A crowd yelling or cheering.  Summer breezes and maybe our own competitive nature.  The thing about baseball is that it's all there.  It's something different for everyone.  It's triumph.  It's trajedy.  It's competition and determination.  It's heroic and villianous.  It's stressful and leisurely at the same time.  You don't have to be at a professional game to get all this from baseball.  Children playing a game in the back yard contains all that baseball has to offer.  That's why it's a special game.  It doesn't see wealth or religion or skin color.  It doesn't pay attention to age or gender.  It's played wherever there's a little room or an open expanse.  With boundaries or without.  With just a piece of wood and a ball of leather you can see your father or your brother or your backyard or the big oak where homeplate used to be.  Maybe you see your own children and how their successes and failures made you feel.  You might see warm summer days playing on the grass or the hard asfault.  Can you see your old little league uniform or your high school team sitting in the dugout?  Nothing conjures up memories like baseball.  Nothing comes close in the line of remeniscing.  It's part of who I am.  It will be part of what my son remembers about his father.  Not only the game itself but the life lessons I learned from a very humbling sport.  It's not always about the bare bones of winning and losing or how many hits you had today.  It's power suggests there is something to be learned from mistakes and an error.  This is the impact this grand game has.  The seven times you didn't succeed can be more useful that those three successes.  How does it work this way?  Is it cosmic or spiritual in some way.  Did God give this game to it's inventor.  There is something infinately more to this game than what you see on the face.  It's somehow deeper and we connect with it somewhere other than on the television or in the sports page.  We connect with it physically at the beginning.  It's throwing and hitting and catching and running.  Then it consumes our mind.  It then becomes something more than an obsession.  It lets us connect to our soul years later when life has gotten in the way of the game.  It has a way of bringing us full circle.  We look at the players on the field but we don't see the players.  We see ourselves.  We see our life before our very eyes.  We believe that we could still do that.  The players on that field in front of us all have familier faces.  I cannot explain this but I have experienced it a time or two.  What is it about a kids game that has meaning only a grown-up can understand?  Why do we feel this way about it.  Why does failure breed success between the baselines but not outside them?  Whatever it is,  it's glorious.  I think it's because we are allowed to stay kids no matter how old we have become as long as we are true to the game.