“If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song,” the titular musician of Inside Llewyn Davis says in the movie’s first scene. And baseball is a folk song. In Cincinnati, where babies are hoisted on shoulders on Opening Day to watch the heroes of their fathers and grandfathers roll past in review, baseball was never new. And we’re discussing robo-umpires for a sport designed in an era when trundling from Missouri to Oregon in under five months was considered making good time: It never gets old. Folk song.
Folk songs need heroes.