LEWISTON — Baseball’s grip on our culture is too strong to explain writers’ love of the game with one reason, says Edward Rielly, an author, professor and poet.

So he has seven.

“I’m going to be mixing up fastballs and knuckle balls here as we move ahead,” Reilly told his Great Falls Forum audience Thursday, comparing his seven reasons to baseball pitches meant to either blow past a batter or meander by. “And I won’t tell you which one is the knuckle ball.”

Pitch one: the game is slow.

“Some might see that as a defect, but that’s a wonderful advantage for writers,” said the Wisconsin native who teaches English at St. Joseph’s College of Maine. “You can really look at the game, seeing all the details. You have time to reflect. You can write a couple of poems between innings it’s so slow.”

Pitch two: the game is pastoral.

“Even when we’re in the middle of the city, it’s still a park,” Rielly said. “There’s a lot of green to look at and even in a modern stadium, there’s a retro feel. It’s a lot like taking your notebook down to the river, watching the river and jotting down some notes for your next story or your next poem.”

Pitch three: the game evokes family.

“Of course, this is great fodder for writers because you like to deal with characterization, with family relationships, and we see that in so much baseball literature.” The movie “Field of Dreams” and its source book, W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe,” examines fathers and sons. The theme occurs again and again, Rielly said.

Pitch four: the game is for everybody.

“You don’t have to be six-feet-eight, you don’t have to weight 350 pounds. You look at professional baseball players and they really look like normal human beings, for the most part. They may be enormously talented, but they look kind of like the rest of us.”

Pitch five: the game has history.

“Baseball is pretty old for this country,” said Rielly, citing versions of the game that go back to the Revolutionary War. “Baseball has grown along with the United States itself. And that has an appealing aspect to it.”

Pitch six: the game has myth.

Rielly quoted late baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti’s allegorical approach to the game, about the quest to return home.

“It’s not just a matter of touching home plate when you score a run but really a sense of trying to return to an earlier time.

Pitch seven: the game is like writing.

Both are exciting and unpredictable. A good game builds like a good story, with heroes, villains and surprises.

What makes Rielly write about baseball?

“All of it,” said the author of “Baseball: An Encyclopedia Of Popular Culture.” He loves the pure competition that feels accentuated by the slow pace. He loves the history. And he recalls his own days as a kid with a ball in his hand.

“I have great memories of the game, even when I was playing by myself with the barn wall,” Rielly said.

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