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.

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.

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.

This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.

Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.

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

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.