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.

When life is suddenly more serious more of the time, there is also more need for it to be fun at least some of the time. That's why my family will be at a college football game this weekend. We need it. And deserve it, too. Not like a New York fireman deserves it. Or a medic at the Pentagon. But enough.

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.

A major golf tournament is 40,000 sadists watching 144 masochists.

Of the big four, the PGA is the most fair and the least fun. Basically, it's just the US Open set up by nice, rather than nasty, fellows.

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

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