National League baseball has just marked its 150th Opening Day. As plans to commemorate the centennial of American Independence took shape in the spring of 1876, a sport that more than any other would embody our national identity was formally organized by Chicago businessman William Hulbert. For fifteen decades since that first Opening Day in April, baseball has been the quintessential American game, and perhaps our country’s most powerful cultural export next to Hollywood.

　　Among the charter eight teams of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs in 1876 was the Chicago White Stockings, who in 1903 adopted the name “Cubs.” The Cubs are the only team from 1876 still to play in their original city, a record not to be taken lightly in a society that values change above tradition.

　　I’ve been a Cubs fan almost as long as I can remember. I can trace my Cubs lineage back to 1910, when my great-grandfather arrived in Chicago from Europe and watched the Cubs at the old West Side Park. That was half a decade before they moved up to the North Side and Weeghman Park, which soon was renamed Wrigley Field. My great-grandfather took my then-six-year-old mother to the World Series in 1945, the last any North Sider would see until 2016.

　　When it became my turn, I eagerly, though not always regularly, went down to the ballpark, first with my uncle and then on my own. I still can feel the freedom of riding the El down from Howard Street to Addison for games. When I took my son to Wrigley for the first time over a decade ago, he became the fifth generation in my family to watch the Cubs play in that cathedral. When I didn’t go to the park, I frequently watched after school on WGN, listening to Jack Brickhouse call the games, which often were losing efforts.

　　Yet most of my friends would not consider me a true baseball fan. I like a clean double-play as much as anyone, but I can’t reel off either team or individual statistics (except a few, like the fact that the 1906 Cubs still hold the record for a single season’s highest winning percentage at .763, though they lost the World Series that year to the crosstown White Sox, tragically). I’ve never memorized the outfield wall distances of different ballparks. I still have trouble keeping straight cutters, sliders, and sinkers. I could never pass one of George Will’s Opening Day quizzes. And I’ve never understood the appeal of fantasy baseball teams.

　　I understand that there is something so American about the fascination with baseball’s numbers—an extension of the competition on the field. Sabermetrics and Moneyball and all the rest are as perfect a reflection of the American psyche as is baseball itself.

　　I was a child of Wrigley Field before lights, and there was nothing like the golden summer sunshine on the verdant green field and ivy-covered walls in the late afternoon.

　　For me, however, it isn’t figures on the scorecard, but rather the history, culture, and lifecycle of baseball that make it our greatest communal activity. As the late Yale president and MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti reminded us, baseball begins in the spring, when everything is reborn, and leaves us in the fall, to face the cold winter alone.

　　Baseball is an entire culture, with its endless lore and colorful lingo. Among professional sports, it was baseball that first inspired great novels, like those of W. P. Kinsella and Bernard Malamud; serious histories, like those of Robert Creamer and Charles Leerhsen; or truly insightful criticism, like that of Roger Angell or George Will, not to mention irreverent exposés like that of Jim Bouton.

　　Baseball’s exquisite balance between individual effort and team play perfectly encapsulates American society. Nothing can happen until the one individual at the mound pitches to the one individual at the plate, even as eight other defensive players wait in anticipation. The beautiful ballfields, whether on the North Side of Chicago or in North Platte, Nebraska, are a link to the open land that we often lose sight of in an ever-more digitized and urbanized world.

　　George Will has warned against idolizing ballparks and the epiphenomena of baseball, making the game itself secondary. Yet I was a child of Wrigley Field before lights, and there was nothing like the golden summer sunshine on the verdant green field and ivy-covered walls in the late afternoon once the Cubs had lost yet another 1:20 start. I never sat in the famous bleachers but was an Upper Deck denizen; if you sat high enough, you could see Lake Michigan past the high-rises, watching the clouds sail past, the sky and lake different shades of blue.

　　They didn’t rush you out of the park then, and it seems now like I sat with friends for hours after the players and fans had gone, watching the groundskeepers tending the field for the next game, a lesson in itself that there is an entire lifecycle associated with the game: it doesn’t simply end when the last out is called.

　　Before pitch clocks, time stopped at the park. I loved low-scoring tie games that would go into extra innings; it felt like being gifted an extension of life. And the old Wrigley forced you to be present, to concentrate: there were no Jumbotrons, no electronic scoreboard, just the classic, hand-operated, field green scoreboard above the bleachers. You had to watch the game, embarrassed if you missed a play that 20,000 other fans had caught.

　　For all its timelessness, baseball has never been static. The deadball era of 1900 to 1920 gave way to the powerful offense of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; astroturf invaded ballparks; and the designated batter once drove a wedge between the leagues. At Wrigley, I understand the need to modernize, but the Jumbotrons have taken away something intimate and special about the park, even as they have helped financially revitalize the club. The most recent innovations in MLB play seem even more intrusive and have diluted the game (zombie runners on second to start extra innings?), as many fans bemoan.

　　Yet baseball’s essential quality abides, as it has for 150 years.

　　What I see today when I watch the Cubs Nico Hoerner or Pete Crow-Armstrong come up to the plate is not an OPS statistic, let alone a $30 million-a-year player. I see them as the great-grandsons of Joe Tinker, Rogers Hornsby, and Gabby Hartnett. When Seiya Suzuki or Matt Busch knocks the dirt off their cleats as they step into the batter’s box, I see the plate crowded with Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, and Ryne Sandberg getting into their crouch.

　　When Dansby Swanson or Matt Shaw is left stranded at second base, I see that longing look to go home, to continue their journey around the bases, mirroring our unfinished journey in life. And if they score, the joy I share with my great-grandfather and mother—and all the other ghosts in the stands—is tempered by knowing the journey soon must begin again. That bittersweet, unfinished optimism is what baseball—and America—is for me.