Lincicome: Baseball in a cornfield? Corny. But imagine life without America's national pastime

The hologram of Harry Caray was spooky, but then this whole notion of baseball in a cornfield is creepy, going back to the book and the movie when Shoeless Joe Jackson walks out of the corn as if he were still alive, although I am suspicious of Ferguson Jenkins and Johnny Bench.

Field of Dreams has a copyright, I suppose, but the notion is free, the idea that happiness is a game of catch whether in a backyard or on a busy street. Baseball does make you believe that.

Games like those between the Cubs and the Reds, or last year the White Sox and Yankees, getting a special wrapping of Iowa corn is, well, corny but harmless. The problem is baseball then becomes baseball now and you can't keep caravanning to yesterday too often.

Stunts like the cornfield game - but not so much hologram Harry - makes you think. And sigh.

No other American sport has so much of our common signature. No sports arguments are more passionate than those over baseball and over baseball's place in our lives.

It is possible to tolerate other sports, but only baseball can be loved.

Football is mock war, violent and frightening when done well, goofy and sad when done badly, but always impossible to enjoy without guilt.

Basketball is frantic, repetitive, and contested in windowless arenas full of competing aromas.

Hockey is an alley fight on skates where it is easy to lose sight of both the object of the game and the puck.

Soccer is ... well, soccer is somebody else's problem.

To believe these arguments you also must believe that you can't follow any sport except baseball without suffering from either neurosis or emphysema.

There may be something to that.

When baseball has the most intense grip on the national consciousness, it is only because it is a cure for the frenzy of ordinary life, an anchor, thoroughly pointless and completely irreplaceable.

Even as sports seasons have piled upon top of each other like discarded laundry, baseball keeps its order, the best reason to be outdoors in spring, summer and fall.

Steadfast in all this current chaos has remained baseball. It is the most legitimate of seasons, contained within one calendar year. If lately baseball has allowed itself to keep company with seeds and brackets and wild cards, deluding itself into accepting the notion that more is more, its heart is still in the daily box score.

Even so, with wild cards and layered playoffs, games early mean as much as games later, as much in frozen April and sweaty August while always reaching for chilly October.

Baseball is the game it always has been, played in comparatively wide-open spaces, with the same equipment and under mostly the same rules - tinker, tinker, designated hitter - now irretrievably into its third century.

The very tediousness that ought to be working against baseball is its salvation.

Baseball can be thoroughly boring, but there is a generous grace in its pace. It is not slow as much as leisurely. The 1-2-3 inning has a remarkable order about it, geometrically perfect, like the circle.

It is the celebration of the individual and the confirmation of the team, the improbable denying the impossible.

The most persistent difficulty with baseball is also its greatest beauty. There is no clock and barely a calendar.

It demands so much time, theirs not ours. Unlike basketball, that has a score every 24 seconds, baseball may not have one in 24 hours.

Unlike football, where action is guaranteed every time the ball is snapped, baseball offers only the motion of the pitcher's arm with no guarantee that the batter is going to even swing at the ball, never mind hit it.

Almost anything that happens in baseball is a surprise. And you have to be paying attention at all times or you miss it.

The remarkable thing is that the pace is appealingly restful. There is a wonderful appeal to entertainment that does not bombard the brain with a climax every other second.

Baseball allows you to breathe, which may be why it became the national pastime in the first place.

Why baseball? Imagine life without it. Not to get corny about this.