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.

Life is more about losing than winning.

It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep as much of that childhood with us as we grow into adulthood, as we can muster... And even after we're past the point of being able to play the game with any skill, if we love it, then it's like Peter Pan - we remain boys forever, we don't die.

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.

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.

For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.