Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

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

Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

I think baseball is a great support to people who have emotional voids, gaps, emotional difficulties. That is to say: all of us. Those parts of us that don’t function well. Those parts of us that are sad or depressed—not every day. They can really use baseball. It isn't just the child in a wheelchair or the shut-in senior citizen listening to the radio that needs the game. There’s part of us, part of everybody who’s a baseball fan, who needs the game at that level.

In and of itself, sports may be trivial, but as a symbol of the American way of life, it has enormous weight. We are seen, worldwide, as an enormously competitive, enthusiastic people who work as hard as we play and play as hard as we work. When baseball - which has traditionally canceled one day of games for huge national celebrations or disasters - stops play for six days, that has reverberations in the national consciousness.

Baseball is really two sports -- the summer game and the autumn game. One is the leisurely pastime of our national mythology. The other is not so gentle.

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