One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.

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

And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'

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

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.

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

Life is more about losing than winning.