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.

My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life's course and, thus, me.

In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.

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

Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro?

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.