The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.

Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.

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.

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

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.

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.

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