The bat stays with me. Isn't that strange? I did so many amazing things on this crazy cross-country trip in search of what baseball means in 2011. I ate a Dodger Dog. I marveled at the artistry of Adrian Gonzalez's swing. ("Artistry" is the only word that comes to mind; if the swing could be frozen, it would be in the Louvre.) I chatted with Vin Scully, took in a game with Bill James on an afternoon when the temperature topped even the heat of Justin Verlander, watched Prince Fielder uncoil his wonderfully violent swing. I contemplated eight simultaneous big league games while eating pizza in Manhattan's East Village, then, 15 hours later and 157 blocks to the north, drank in the sound of a city in full celebration of history. I munched Cracker Jack in Cooperstown, that little American village where people so desperately want to believe baseball was invented.

And so ... why the bat? Why does the bat keep reemerging in my mind, like a summer song that won't stop repeating? It's just a bat. It might not even be regulation size. No one used it to crack his 3,000th hit or smack his 500th homer. This bat was never even used in a major league game, or a minor league game, or a Little League game, or any real game at all.

Still ... Why do I think it's all about that bat?

Baseball is a game out of time. This is the sport's defining quality, its badge of honor. The people who love baseball—the poets, the stat geeks, the bleacher bums, the second-guessers, the former pitchers, the collectors—we love baseball for its timelessness. It is a game without a clock. "Keep the rally alive," the marvelous Roger Angell wrote, "and you have defeated time."

The people who do not love baseball feel its timelessness too. They lampoon a game that feels ... so ... yesterday. They mock baseball for not having a clock, for its interminable pauses, for sparking so little violence and motion, for struggling to adapt (No replay? Really?), for being measured by numbers well to the ...