Baseball

Strange bedfellows is the obvious objection and the review answers it correctly: baseball is already a game of omens, streaks, curses, rituals and long-suffering faith, the most metaphor-saturated institution in American life, which makes it far better tarot material than it first appears. Mark Lerner and Dan Gardiner's 1999 deck plays it straight across a full seventy-eight cards, the game's situations and figures mapped onto the deck's structure, Americana carrying the arcana. Novelty decks live or die by whether the theme does interpretive work or just decorates, and baseball's built-in drama, the slump, the rally, the error, the called shot, gives readings genuine vocabulary: everyone understands what bases loaded means about a situation. It suits baseball people completely, readers who teach tarot through familiar metaphor, and collectors of American novelty decks with actual substance. Readers allergic to sports will be reading in a foreign language, and should choose a park they love.