Baseball isn’t what happens between the lines.

It surrounds us. It steers us. It consumes us.

“It takes hold of us, a mystical unrelenting force that someone outside the baseball cult couldn’t possibly understand,” David Stearns once wrote, as a sports columnist at The Harvard Crimson. “From the time of your first game, from the time you can put on a cap, from the time you know what 6-4-3 actually means, it’s got you.

“It makes you define seemingly important moments in your non-baseball life by baseball-related events.”