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I've been thinking about the peculiar feature of baseball, among the big four American team sports.  It's the sport in which there is the most TALKING, by far.  Basketball and hockey, continuous action sports with smallish squads (basketball smaller than hockey), don't leave much space for conversation, not even among players not on the ice or the court.  There's too much intense focus on the moment-to-moment action.  There's plenty of opportunity in football, because half the starters are on the bench at any one time, and in fact you can see the players talking, often shouting, or you see defensive or offensive coordinators talking, or shouting, at their charges.  Still, it's not as much as there is in baseball.  In baseball, important players (starting pitchers who are not starting that day) are in the dugout, talking constantly, either the whole game through, or when the team is at bat; and then there are the gum-chewers in the bullpen, who can sit back and enjoy the game at least during the early innings most of the time ...

Even on the field there's a lot of talk.  More than in the old days, probably, when it was considered a breach of The Rules to talk to an opponent.  Bob Gibson NEVER said a word to an opponent.... That's why players were really surprised when they came to the Cardinals and found what a nice guy and great teammate he was.  

Of course I'm partial to the game.  It's my favorite among those four.  It's the game that lends itself most readily to numbers, numbers, numbers ... And, as in football, you can re-create exact situations, and argue about what they should have pitched or not pitched, whether they should have called a bunt or not, and so on forever.  Baseball is the only one of the four that has no clock, and the defense, not the offense, has the ball, so you can't just sit on a lead and wait things out... 

I guess that talking about the game BEFORE and AFTER the game is also a big part of learning it when you are a kid, maybe more than in sports that rely upon sheer physical strength or speed.  It seems that FAMILIES are more prominent in baseball than in the football and basketball (hockey does appear to have family lines: the Richards, the Espositos, the Hulls, the Sutters).  My team, the Cardinals, has since the year I was born had at least one player (and usually two or three, sometimes four or five) who had a brother, a father, or a son in the Majors.  Most of the time at least one of the "others" had real careers, too, and not just a peek: Ken and Clete Boyer, Matty and Felipe Alou, Bob and Ken Forsch, Andy and Scott Van Slyke, J. D. and Stephen Drew, Yadier and Benji Molina ... 

And yet probably the SINGLE greatest sports family in the US is the Matthews football dynasty ... and a trio of guys named Manning ....