But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity g….

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..

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 profitabili….

Although the world proved not yet ready for the brotherhood of baseball, that would be only a matter of time, baseball magnates believed..

In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way..

Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national….

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..

More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home….

It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep as much of that childhood with us as we grow int….

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….

We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civ….

Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles ….

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 d….

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

Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and….

Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young..

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

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

Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people..