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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'