The announcement that four living presidents will get national face time during All-Star ceremonies next week reminds us that baseball, for all its inglorious warts, remains more deeply entwined in America's history than any other sport.

The game is no narrative parallel for the richly layered great American epic, but its own history often is presented in a similar pedagogical fashion, i.e. as a chronological listing of important years, though much depends on interpretation.

"The Last Pure Season" is Kerry Keene's ode to 1960, while Michael Shapiro's book "The Last Good Season" carries the subtitle, "Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and their final pennant race together" and targets 1956 as deserving of literature. And on it goes on bookshelves across the Americas.

Your results may vary, but my own reflexive recollection of baseball's most prominent historical markers goes roughly like this:

1919 -- The year of the Black Sox Scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.

1927 -- The year Babe Ruth, at the height of his sometimes mythical powers, hit 60 home runs to finish the process of saving baseball from the Black Sox Scandal.

1941 -- Joe D and Teddy Ballgame, one hitting in 56 consecutive games, the other batting .406, unapproachable figures.

1947 -- Jackie Robinson crosses baseball's shameful color line.

1951 -- Bobby Thomson's shot heard round the world forever defines the real dream of any baseball summer -- winning the pennant.

1955 -- Just another Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Yankees World Series, except in this one and only, the Dodgers win.

1960 -- The only time a baseball season ends on a ninth-inning Game 7 homer. A half century later, the Pirates are still milking it.

1968 -- The year of the pitcher, in which Juan Marichal goes 28-6 with 30 complete games, and somehow failed to lead the big leagues in wins (Denny McLain, 31) or earned run average (Bob Gibson, 1.12).

1979 -- The last Pirates world championship, and I don't mean the most recent.

1994 -- Rather than agree on how to divvy up $5 billion, baseball's owners and players decide they would rather take the game away from the fans. Who won the 1994 World Series? Nobody.

1998 -- Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa save baseball again, but the steroid cure is worse than the disease, and, finally, and perhaps most indispensably:

2003 -- Randall Simon. A bat. A racing sausage. A $432 fine.

Now, before my inbox (still unsponsored, by the way) is buried in much needed amendments, let me throw out the first correction, which was actually suggested indirectly via snail mail some months ago (thank you Tom Carvlin of Dolton, Ill.) before the above list was even crystallized.

Any such list that includes 1968, a column on the 40th anniversary of which appeared in this space a year ago this week, must be compelled to include 1930, because as the '68 season was drenched by superior pitching that necessitated a change in the game's dynamics, 1930 brought an unprecedented storm of offense that did the same thing.

In 1968, only six players hit .300, but in the fun house-mirror image that was 1930, nine teams hit .300, as did the entire National League (.303). Chuck Klein of the Philadelphia Phillies hit .386 with 40 homers and 170 RBIs and did not lead the league in any of those categories.

Bill Terry of the New York Giants hit .401, the last National Leaguer to hit .400, and Hack Wilson of the Cubs hit 56 homers (the league record until McGwire's tainted 70 in 1998), and drove in 190 runs. About 50 years later, Cubs slugger Dave Kingman reportedly had his agent insist on a bonus if he set the franchise record for RBIs. No problem, said management. Kingman never came within 75 of it.

A scoring error subsequently discovered by the late sports writer Jerome Holtzman added an RBI to Wilson's 1930 total. The record is now 191, much of it apparently compiled with a hangover.

The midsummer of 1930 meant you could buy a new Chevy for $560, you could -- if you dared -- get acquainted with that new invention -- the tea bag, but you couldn't get through an inning of a major league baseball game, it seemed, without a hail of lined drives.

The St. Louis Cardinals had a played named Showboat Fisher, who was hitting .374 in 250 at-bats that year. They sent him to the minors. It was just lucky that William Baker, the Phillies' owner, was so cheap that he had the right-field fence at Baker Bowl extended upward to keep Klein in the ballpark.

Thus 1930, 10 years removed from the so-called dead-ball era, stood out as the year of the "extremely live ball," which was followed immediately by an industrial turn back toward deadening the thing in the name of pitching sanity.

Those eras -- live ball, dead ball -- remain confusing to most people under 60.

Luckily, there is universal agreement that there was only one era in which running wieners were whacked by Randall Simon. Now that's historic.