Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.

We play because we are wired for joy; it is imperative as human beings.

One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.

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.

Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.

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.