Baseball is biblical.  It acts out our desire to make our way back home, to get back to the Garden of Eden.  So pointed out literary scholar, then President of Yale University, then Baseball Commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti in Take Time for Paradise (1989): “It is the story . . . of going home after having left home, the story of how difficult it is to find the origins one so deeply needs to find” (p. 90).

In an earlier book, from his time as a professor of literature, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (1966), Giamatti pointed out that the word “paradise” derives from a Persian word, pairidaeza, that referred to a royal park enclosed by a wall.  In the Greek of the New Testament, it became paradeisos, and subsequently in Late Latin, paradisus, by which time it came to refer to what we now also call Heaven (pp.20-22).