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 over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.

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.'

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.

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

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.

But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.