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

John Thorn

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John Thorn
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: April 17
Author
Historian
Journalist
Made
Chains
Havens
Haven
Events
Worrisome
Game
Nineteenth
Century
Describes
Clear
Chain
Games
Ties

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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 declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.
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Keep score, which is what the Talmud recognizes as a distinction between work and play that renders a game unfit for the Sabbath.
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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.
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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 for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.
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Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 work but is work.
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The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.
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Life is more about losing than winning.
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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 symbol, and our national treasure.
John Thorn
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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?
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Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.
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