In this novel baseball is two different metaphors, depending on who the reader asks. If the reader asks the Republican men in leadership at the high school, baseball is clearly a way to sharpen young men's minds for a future in the competitive market. However, if the reader asks the novel's protagonist, they will find pages and pages of prose suggesting that baseball isn't a metaphor for competition at all. To Coach Sweet, baseball is an act of love and fun, designed as a personal exercise in excellence.
The novel is therefore oriented around motivation, because by setting the boys intentions on something other than victory, he helps them escape the various kinds of negative emotion that often stump young baseball players at the plate. Their team is skillful, because the coaching teaches them to focus on the development of skill, because it is fun to become better at something, and although the discipline is a task one has to learn, once discipline is in place, baseball becomes something closer to a kind of spiritual discipline.
Lynn Sweet is a kind of yogic baseball coach, because he isn't distracted by the narratives that people tried to teach him, narratives about war and competition for instance, which he ignored though they came from his own father. The novel is clearly a narrative too, pointing toward quiet integrity and independence, noticing that if a person follows their intuition, they will certainly endure scrutiny from their peers and leaders, but after all, he discovers the famous player, Steve Shartzer, so clearly there is a reward for Coach Sweet's performance.
