A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.

Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.

Terrorism drives out all normal human activity before it, defining life in its own sick terms, if it can. So, a baseball game on a sultry Texas night before a huge crowd, with everyone feeling perfectly safe, is exactly what terrorists hate. Which is why it is so important to resume such athletic rituals - which symbolize stability, confidence and order - as soon as is reasonably possible.

An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

The best place to catch a baseball hit by (Mark) McGwire is definitely not within the confines of the playing field, or sometimes even the ballpark. Other players dial '1' for long distance. McGwire has to ask for an international operator.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

Cheating is baseball's oldest profession. No other game is so rich in skullduggery, so suited to it or so proud of it.