There is severe classic tragedy within major-league baseball, tragedy which catches and manipulates the fife of every athlete as surely as forces beyond the heaths manipulated Hardy's simple Wes-sex folks into creatures of imposing stature. Major-league baseball is an insecure society it pays a lavish salary to an athlete and then, when he reaches thirty-five or so, it abruptly stops paying him anything. But the tragedy goes considerably deeper than that. Briefly, it is the tragedy of fulfillment. Each major leaguer, like his childhood friends, always wanted desperately to become a major leaguer. Whenever there was trouble at home, in school, or with a girl, there was the sure escape of baseball not the stumbling, ungainly escape of an ordinary ballplayer, but a sudden, wondrous metamorphosis into the role of a hero. For each major leaguer was first a star in his neighborhood or in his town, and each rived with the unending solace that there was one thing he could always do with grace and skill and poise. Somehow, he once believed with the most profound faith he possessed, that if he ever did make the major leagues, everything would then become ideal. A major-league baseball team is comprised of twenty-five youngish men who have made the major leagues and discovered that, in spite of it, life remains distressingly short of ideal. In retrospect, they were better off during the years when their adolescent dream was happily simple and vague. Among the twenty-five youngish men of a ball club, who individually held the common dream which came to be fulfilled, cynicism and disillusion are common as grass. So Willie Mays angrily announces that he will henceforth charge six hundred dollars to be interviewed, and Duke Snider shifts his dream-site from a ball park to an avocado farm overlooking the Pacific, and Peewee Reese tries to fight off a momentary depression by saying, 'Sure I dreamt about baseball when I was a kid, but not the night games. No, sir. I did not dream about the fights. ' For most men, the business of shifting and reworking dreams comes late in life, when there are older children upon whose unwilling shoulders the tired dreams may be deposited. It is a harsh, jarring thing to have to shift dreams at thirty, and if there is ever to be a major novel written about baseball, it will have to come to grips with this theme. The first paragraph indicates that______.