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.

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.

In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

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.

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.

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