Time & Perspective Quote by John Thorn

Baseball is one of the few American entertainments that can credibly call itself an argument with time. John Thorn, as the sport's most prominent historian, isn’t romanticizing nostalgia so much as naming baseball’s central technology: it turns the past into an active ingredient rather than a museum label. “Living heritage” lands because it refuses the dead-weight version of tradition. Heritage, in Thorn’s framing, isn’t a plaque on a stadium wall; it’s a routine that keeps reanimating old meanings every night a pitcher toes the rubber.

The line’s quiet drama sits in “poised between.” Baseball is structurally suspended: a game without a clock, built on repetition and failure, where the same motions return but never quite the same way. That’s why “undertow” is the perfect dark word. The past doesn’t merely accompany the game; it pulls. Records, legends, ballpark lore, and “how it’s supposed to be played” exert a real force on players, fans, even rulemakers. Thorn hints at the seductive danger of that pull: tradition can become a current strong enough to resist change, whether we’re talking about analytics, labor battles, or whose stories get centered in the official narrative.

Then he pivots to the future in a deliberately modest register: not utopia, just “next day, next week, next year.” That’s baseball’s promise-making scale. It sells hope in installments - the daily redemption of another at-bat, the long season as moral economy, the idea that tomorrow is always scheduled. Thorn’s intent is to explain why baseball endures in a culture that burns through novelty: it’s built to make time feel both heavy and restartable.