Bill's Friend Comments

This is the way we die. Middle-aged men with martini bellies shoveling soggy snow off a rink, or charging the net, or sprinting around some steamy track in July, trying to prove something. The bloated heart seizes, the stressed vessel explodes, and suddenly we're pitched into the abyss, face flat against the ice, the clay, the cinders.

It's the mathematical potential for a single baseball game to last forever, in a suspended world where no clock rules the day, that aligns baseball as much with the dead as the living.

It's the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth you can always pull out a miracle.