Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.

Although the world proved not yet ready for the brotherhood of baseball, that would be only a matter of time, baseball magnates believed.

More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.

Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.

I'd just like to see - in writing about baseball - more energy and better craft, minus statistical bludgeoning and invective.

As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green.

Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.