Philip Roth saw baseball as a more perfect microcosm of reality, a vision that informed his fiction. Photograph by Lars Tunbjork / Agence VU / Redux

In Milwaukee last month, I had the chance to go to a Brewers game, where I bought a bratwurst and cheese curds and sat in the sunshine deliberating over whether getting the “baseball experience” required me to pay attention to baseball. There were five of us; from my left, I processed basic explanations of the scoreboard, and, from my right, a statistical, almost Talmudic stream of mythography about the diamond. I have forgotten many of the things I learned, but I will not forget that a ball caught in the field does not need to be thrown to first base in order to tag the batter out—it’s curtains for him, no matter how fast he runs. There’s nothing he can do to save himself. Baseball, eloquent of the lost pastoral, revealed to me its elegiac shape.

I had been primed to react this way because I had read Philip Roth. For him, baseball was never just baseball—it was a theatre for the energies of American life. The sport embodied the country’s unattained ideals. “Through baseball,” Roth wrote in an essay for the Times, in 1973, “I came to understand and experience patriotism in its tender and humane aspects, lyrical rather than martial or righteous in spirit, and without the reek of saintly zeal, a patriotism that could not quite so easily be sloganized.” The game “was a kind of secular church,” Roth continued, “that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms.”

Roth’s sense of baseball as a more perfect microcosm of reality informed his fiction. The main character in “American Pastoral,” Swede Levov, is an ace first baseman, the hero of his high school. Through Levov’s physical achievements, “the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world. . . . Our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes.” The field of play is where the community, leaving behind anxieties about sons and brothers fighting overseas, recaptures its innocence. “Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder—and nothing more!” Alexander Portnoy cries in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” The dream of baseball is a dream of simplicity.

For Roth, who wrote that his roots in the United States “were strong but only inches deep,” the national sport was a graspable piece of Americana. But it was also something more. In his essay for the Times, he connected his love of the game to his love for fiction. “Baseball,” he suggested, “with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longeurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its heroics, its nuances, its ‘characters,’ its language, and its mythic sense of itself, was the literature of my boyhood.”

To read Roth’s descriptions of the diamond is to feel some of the escape that athletics offered his characters. (It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that Portnoy would masturbate into a baseball mitt.) These men were often talky, neurotic; their logorrhea was both cause and symptom of their agitation. They were hectic fonts of accents and impersonations. (“If de goyim say bunt, let dem bunt!”) But, when they threw a baseball around, language became irrelevant. The qualities of physical grace and composure inherent to the author’s prose don’t really define his characters. Now and then, however, in a passage set on the baseball field, the writing and the psychology harmonize. “The Great American Novel,” published in 1973, tells the story of a baseball team composed of inept war veterans and ex-cons. In one scene, the players, led by a pitcher who yelps a little with every throw, transport their fans:

It would seem . . . that [the spectators] were transfixed, perhaps for the first time in their lives, by the strangeness of things, the wondrous strangeness of things, by all that is beyond the pale and just does not seem to belong in this otherwise cozy and familiar world of ours. With the sun all but down and the far corners of the stadium vanishing, the noise he made might have originated in the swaying jungle foliage or in some dark pocket of the moon for the sense of fear and wonder that it awakened in men who only a moment earlier had been anticipating their slippers and their favorite chair, a bottle of beer and those lovely memories they would have forever after of all those runners they'd seen galloping around third that afternoon.

The baseball field, like the page, was a place of illusion and possibility for Roth. Even after his death, it’s hard not to see him as some kind of fabular athlete: the guy who steps up to the plate and swings and the ball sails over the fence and just keeps going.