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.

Just because I am increasingly bored by sabermetric arcana doesn't mean anyone else has to be; it remains good for people who like that sort of thing.

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.'

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.

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.

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

Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.