“Baseball satisfies people who are seeking some order in their lives. Fiction is another attempt to impose order on chaos.”

This is the way the celebrated novelist, short story artist, and critic John Updike compares baseball to writing. Now 73, with hair turned white above his craggy profile, Updike (like many another) has grown into better looks in later life than he had when young.

The setting where he made the comparison was a perfect fit for the subject. Updike was sitting on a platform with four other writers, high in the sky above home plate at Fenway Park. Taking advantage of the Red Sox playing away in St. Louis, PEN New England (the writers’ group) had staged a forum featuring Roger Angell, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen King, and Michael Lewis, along with Updike, to talk about baseball and writing, and the connection between the two.

It felt idyllic to sit among hundreds of fans in the 406 Club, high atop home plate,  and look out over the playerless field at night. The Pesky Pole in right field looked close enough to touch, and the many corporate signs scattered throughout the surfaces formed a patchwork quilt. At one point, a dark cloudbank full of potential rain moved across the sky, like a fit of pessimism about the home team’s chances for another championship.

The authors joined in celebrating the beauties of the game, as all five have done in their published work. Another writer, not part of the panel but connected by blood with the home team, Leslie Epstein (his son is the wunderkind general manager of the Red Sox), touched on the perils of losing oneself in the emotions of a crowd of joyful, rabid fans.

That discordant comment would become part of a subtext for the evening, beneath a dreamy surface of nostalgia for the game. Ultimately, that underlying theme would prove for me the most provocative part of the event.

Doris Kearns Goodwin sees her career as historian rooted in her childhood, when she would report to her father the results of the day’s Brooklyn Dodgers’ games after he came home from work. At first, she would blurt out the final score, but in time she learned better. In the process, she discovered that she had to tell a story “from the beginning, to the middle and the end.”

Roger Angell credits his father with forging his love of baseball. “Father made me feel at home in the ballpark,” recalls this now 85-year-old New Yorker writer. Since his father was born in 1889, the lives of this father and son span almost the whole history of the game.

Stephen King’s personal link with the game was through his mother. She worked in a Stratford, Connecticut, laundry, the only white woman there. All the workers rooted for the Dodgers because of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke baseball’s color barrier. King’s mother also read to him on summer nights, but she herself was absorbed by Gone With the Wind. This popular classic, with its 1040 pages, prompted her son to ask how long a book could be.

Her answer, “as long as you want it to be,” reminds the popular novelist of baseball. This game can go into extra innings; until you make three outs, you are always up. Similarly, for King, writers “do it until it’s done, until we are satisfied.”

Michael Lewis finds that “baseball is very clean for the writer.” By contrast with other sports, “it’s easy to assign credit and blame, the confrontations end to be either man versus man, man versus fly ball, etc. It’s more transparent.”

Half way through this nostalgia-laced group exchange, Stephen King suddenly asked: “Why is almost every face white here?” The question led to a discussion of why relatively few black people attend Red Sox games. An African American member of the audience rose to answer: because of blacks’ resentment of white people who judge black athletes as simply gifted by nature with great skills, and fail to appreciate the hard work that has gone into their success on the ball field.

Later, Ms.Goodwin criticized major league baseball for the way players are constantly leaving their teams for others that will pay them more money. Even more serious, some teams in small money markets year after year have no realistic hope of making the playoffs.

These and other reasons have made me sour on the game that I used to love uncritically. Money and hype have become such dominant factors in the big leagues that I feel alienated and have not attended a Red Sox game in years.

At the forum’s end I buttonholed both Doris Kearns Goodwin and John Updike and got them to admit that some of the romance has gone out of the game for them also. But I doubt either would have said so in the forum itself, an admission that might have spoiled an atmosphere so worshipful of the game.

Richard Griffin