I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don’t count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.

Bruce Sutter and his new pitch, the split finger fastball, fascinate the manager of the Cuban national teams. ‘We must find out about this new weapon,’ he said. ‘Are the American hitters plotting to murder him?

As every golfer knows, no one ever lost his mind over one shot. It is rather the gradual process of shot after shot watching your score go to tatters – knowing that you have found a different way to bogey each hole.

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.

Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game’s best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech – a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

Baseball means Spring’s Here. Football means Winter’s Coming.

Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it’s beginning to seem that way. We’re reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life. Take your pick.

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.

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