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.

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.

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

We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.

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

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.

Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.