Baseball and country music, America’s most celebrated forms of popular art, have much in common: They are best enjoyed on the radio, in the summer, with the windows down; they are homespun and freewheeling in theory but held rigid in reality by unwritten codes; their most gifted practitioners come up from obscurity and poverty to reach fame and fortune ... but not without first paying their dues in a series of seedy honky-tonks or crumbling minor-league parks, many of them located in the very same crumbling American towns.
At Texas Rangers camp in Surprise, Ariz., on a bright day early last March, there are more aspiring baseball players than any team could ever need.