The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin', in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.

I’d just like to see – in writing about baseball – more energy and better craft, minus statistical bludgeoning and invective.

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.

And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball’s profitability by ‘running the game like a business.’

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.

My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life’s course and, thus, me.

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.

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.

If I haven’t made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.

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.