 The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball. |
| We are fans because the game also appeals to our local pride, our pleasure in thinking of ourselves as, yes, Americans but nonetheless different from residents of other towns, other states, other regions. |
| The National League was born the following year, as an attempt to exert the control of capital over labor. |
| But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world. |
| The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same. |
| Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail. |
| 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. |
| 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 blissfully ignorant of the reality of death. |
| This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family. |
| 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. |
| I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth. |
| But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys. |
| Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro? |
| Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come. |
