Baseball expresses basic Christian themes: a primary state of innocence, the batter setting himself at the plate; a temptation, the offering of the ball by the pitcher; a fall, the self-condemnation by hitting the ball to the diminished role of a base runner; sin, the passive touching of a base; faith, running the bases or taking a lead off base; grace, a sudden unmerited aid that leads to advancement on the bases or scoring a run; and the final redemption of reaching the place at home plate where a player was at the beginning. The game evolved throughout the nineteenth century to the form we know today. The way a baseball game works and the way people of the time lived were so closely interrelated that no one needed then to think symbolically about baseball. A man who struck out at the plate failed. No one needed to tell him that he risked failure both in life and in a game. He risked striking out in both. Americans understood they were living in a tough survival-of-the-fittest free-enterprise economy and it was probably obvious to them that baseball was a survival-of-the-fittest game. But white American Protestants of the time were a people of the bible. Even irreligious and skeptical people knew their bible. They failed economically or succeeded economically but they also failed or succeeded religiously. Did they see expressed in baseball what they read about in their bibles? If they did, no one except Mark Twain wrote about baseball as a symbol. He called baseball "the very symbol, the outward and visible expression, of the nineteenth century." In our twenty-first century it is difficult to see the symbolism in baseball because we think of it as one game when in reality it is two games combined, the ball game between pitchers and batters and the base game when batters reach base and become runners. The ball game began 3000 years ago in what is now Mexico when the Olmec people learned how to make rubber balls. The invention of the ball led to the invention of the ancient American ball game. A man on one team on a ball court threw his body against the descending ball sent towards him by an enemy player to shoot it back up into the heavens. His body achieved a degree of immortality by becoming an instrument to assure that the ball did not strike the ground and mimic the disaster of a planet in the sky falling to earth. White American Protestants took this basic ball game played for centuries in North America, revised it and made the extraordinary creative leap of adding the diamond-shaped pathways to the bases around the ball game at the center. Pitching and batting, the ball game part of baseball, has its origin in an ancient ball game full of symbols. The ball still flies from the member of one team, the pitcher, to a member of another team, a batter, who tries to hit the ball up into the sky. Once the ball is hit, the baseball players on the defense like the ancient ball players try not to let the ball hit the ground. The introduction to this basic ball game - the game between batters and a pitcher - of the diamond-shaped base paths is a radical change and expansion of the basic ball game. There is no logical connection between pitching/batting, one game, and running the bases, the second game. Many batters do not reach a base. But it was a stroke of genius to combine two distinct types of activities that nonetheless work harmoniously together. Two separate games, pitching/batting and running the bases, are somehow synthesized artistically in baseball like two melodies combined in one musical piece. This book argues that the ingenious game of baseball that resulted is art. Baseball is art because it refashions life into a purer image of itself. Baseball is the American national theater because it expresses the most fundamental dramatic themes of the American experience. Baseball is art because it has a symbolic structure that presents to us creative images of life worthy of being pondered and contemplated.