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

Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure.

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.

If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.

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.

But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.

Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.