Homer and Baseball

When I first started studying Homeric poetry, I was quickly introduced to the work of Milman
Perry, who finally unlocked the key to the “Homeric Greek” which was not like any spoken
Greek.
The oral storytelling of the Homeric bard consisted of telling a story that had specific plot
elements, points that had to be worked into the story, and episodes of a certain length. But
the bard was able, in his presentation, to orally improvise as he told the story, by combining
certain stock phrases together with original material. These stock phrases helped the oral
bard stay within the (strict) confines of the poetic meter of Homerian poetry by giving a set
of building blocks to help construct the tale in real time as it was being told.
I found this concept to be unusually familiar, because I had been listening to baseball
broadcasts on the radio for years before I ever studied Homer in any detail. Base...