Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.

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

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.

I am opposed, naturally, to regurgitating anecdote or any other form of received wisdom, unless it is characterized as such.

For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.

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

Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.