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

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

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

We play because we are wired for joy; it is imperative as human beings.

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.'

As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green.

Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people.