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There are plenty of things you whippersnappers take for granted that were nothing but dreams and mysteries to those of us who were responsible for digging up so many of the early answers. We had to get to the bottom of all manner of monkey business, and to say that we had limited resources at our command would be the sort of understatement that was pretty much our stock in trade in those days. We didn’t dare to overstate.

Some of our discoveries were pure products of curiosity or confusion, but there were also speculations and necessary innovations that were literally life-and-death matters. We had people dropping like flies who’d barely learned to walk yet, and had to learn to feed and clothe ourselves in a hurry.

Those were dark, cold, brutal days. The Dark Ages were a period of positive enlightenment in comparison. We had no idea how our bodies worked or what our business was on this unforgiving planet. God? God? We weren’t nearly that crafty yet. You could say we were savages, and you wouldn’t be missing the mark by much.

The nose and the mysteries of its purpose and productions was one challenge, a relatively minor piece of the puzzle, granted, but important all the same. The responsibility for this undertaking of discovery fell to me by virtue of my natural scientific inclinations, although we certainly weren’t yet equipped to think of it in quite that way. Everything I say in this regard is thus hindsight, and a literal case of ‘relatively speaking.’

Truth was, I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, but compared to most of the others I was an advanced specimen. When I first got started on my researches I didn’t –or we didn’t– even have any sort of basic understanding of the sense of smell, and we certainly didn’t connect it in any way with the nose. For all we then knew, what we now think of as odors may well have been perceived through our mouths or eyes, or even our skin.

I spent years on these labors. I probed and mulled and hypothesized. I like to think I made some progress. I was, I’ll admit, entirely flummoxed by congestion. We didn’t have microscopes, of course; we didn’t even have the most rudimentary sort of magnifying devices. I smeared more snot on rocks than I care to remember, and sat in the dirt studying it, moving it around with a stick and trying to make sense of the damn mess. Was it, I wondered, some sort of delivery or storage mechanism for odors? Or perhaps, I hypothesized early on, it was dead matter being sloughed by the brain and evacuated through the nostrils (by this time we’d dabbled a bit in forensics, and had cracked open more than a few skulls and studied their contents).

I never reached any satisfactory conclusions, I’m afraid, but I’m proud to say that when I officially retired they appointed five men –a damned committee– to carry on my researches, and that pack of learned baboons never got anywhere either.

Where is it you find yourself?

Right here.

Might I ask you to be more specific?

On the floor, surrounded by records, books, and baseball things.

Baseball things?

Yes, books, mitts, that sort of thing.

You say ‘surrounded’ –are there in fact a great many of these things?

Yes, a great many indeed.

Do you find it somehow comforting to be among these things?

Sometimes, yes, I suppose I do. Other times, I don’t know, it makes me feel done for.

How so?

Well, this is really the one place where everything from my life sort of comes together –past, present, future– and yet it also strikes me as pure folly. All of this stuff is like a monument to my ridiculous, wasted life, and when I’m gone it’s just going to be a giant headache for somebody else. It will all end up being carted away, sold off, dispersed, or simply thrown out. I know the history of every item in this room —my history, I should say, but before they came into my possession so many of these things had a history with someone else, maybe a whole bunch of someone elses, and I spend a great deal of time trying to imagine and reconstruct that history. Nobody’s going to care about any of that when I’m dead. They’ll just talk about all the crazy junk I left behind.

I’m sure to some extent that will be the fate of all of us.

Yes, but I often fear that will be the sole extent of my legacy.

I’ve agreed to this nonsense with the utmost reluctance, and if you studied the conditions of our arrangement that Zellar outlined below I think you’ll agree that I drive a hard bargain. Even so, I can’t pronounce myself satisfied. If I live to be fifty it’s not likely you’ll hear me pronounce myself satisfied.

There are some things I should get off my chest right off the bat. First of all, I don’t love baseball. I tolerate it and I couldn’t live without it, but it’s been an abusive, dysfunctional relationship right from the start. It’s an impossible game that’ll break your mind and crush your spirit, and it will pick you up only to knock you back down on your ass.

I also don’t buy into a single scrap of the nonsense that fools get paid to spout about the sport. There are no aesthetics to the game, and the only reason I’m familiar with that word in the first place is because for years I’ve had it shoved down my throat in connection with baseball by scrawny little blowhards like George Will and Bob Costas.

I don’t have anything at all against the Metrodome –well, other than that it occasionally fills up with people whose company I find more than unpleasant, and I suppose also the fact that a couple years ago some overzealous security geezer confiscated a can of Vienna sausages from me on opening day. But whatever it is that people call atmosphere or amenities mean less than nothing to me. You can go right ahead and take the wrecking ball to Fenway Park and Wrigley Field for all I care. Every kid who ever played baseball should understand that it makes absolutely no difference where you play the game –you can play it in a dirt lot or a parking lot or a gymnasium. The challenges and frustrations are essentially the same.

I’ll tell you what baseball really is. It’s not, as Zellar alleged below, play, and it’s not work. It’s not even properly a game, although I’ll use that word for lack of a better one, and because in the darker psychological sense of “playing games” or “mind games” it makes a certain sense.

What baseball is, though, is nothing but concentration, a series of moments of intense concentration –concentration frustrated and concentration rewarded, in a ratio that is cruelly one-sided. That’s as true for the people who merely appreciate the game as it is for those who play it. Every single thing that happens on a baseball field is an incident of extreme concentration or a lapse thereof. That’s all baseball is, and anyone who says otherwise is a pie-in-the-sky idiot.

I also have almost no interest in statistics. Anyone who cares enough about baseball to be interested in statistics should be plenty qualified to judge the merits of a ballplayer, and to distinguish between the horseshit, the mediocre, the merely good, and the truly great. I don’t need some pencil-necked, number-crunching geek to tell me that Johan Santana is a better pitcher than Mike Morgan, or Mike Mussina for that matter.

The other clear problem with stats is that they don’t deal with the harsh realities of the game, and consequently with its terrible beauty. Baseball is a day-by-day, at-bat-by-at-bat game, and on any given one of those 162 days, and in any one of those at-bats, Nick Fucking Punto can be a better player than Joe Mauer, and Terry Mulholland can be a more valuable pitcher than Santana. If I pay my hard-earned money to see Albert Pujols play and he goes 0-5 and strands six runners and the Cardinals lose 7-2, well, sorry, but that day Pujols is a horseshit player. Projections and suppositions and probability mean less than nothing within the context of a single game. I’ve been kicked in the nuts by so-called superstars too many times and had too many miserable days salvaged by footnotes to doubt the sound logic of this assertion.

Baseball is all about ‘what have you done for me lately?’ And, actually, not just lately, but today. I don’t care who you are or what your numbers look like, if you can’t get the runner in from third with less than two outs you can kiss my fat ass.

Just in case I’m alarming you, or somehow giving the wrong impression, I should make it clear that for all the misery it’s caused me and will continue to cause me, baseball is still the only so-called sport that’s worth a dick or a dime. Virtually every other major sport –football, basketball, hockey, soccer, and tennis– is essentially a version of ping pong or foosball played by people in ridiculous outfits. Tennis may be the only sport where the female combatants look more physically imposing and menacing than the men.

And the only thing I despise more than golf or automobile racing is the Olympics. They did, as I have often pointed out, once serve at least some purpose, back in the days when McDonald’s would give you a Big Mac if, say, some anonymous jackass won a gold medal in the high hurdles. But as I’ve also frequently said, if I had to go to bed every night dreaming of a gold medal in the triple jump I’d put my head in the oven faster than you can say Nestor Chylak.

I also take exception to the notion that baseball is some kind of rite of generations, all that horseshit about fathers playing catch with sons, blah blah blah. My old man was a saint who busted his nuts his entire life, but he once famously told me he’d rather have Liberace’s name tattooed on his ass than sit through a game of baseball. I didn’t blame him, and I also never held it against him that he never saw me play ball. I’m not even sure the guy ever had a baseball mitt on his hand.

So, look, we have all this straight, right? I hate the game, but it’s seriously the only anchor I have, and it’s too late to climb off the black bus now. I’ll be there tonight in my usual seat in left field, hunched over my scorecard and, barring security interference, munching on my customary bag of peanuts and tin of Vienna sausages. I’ll be the big guy in the top row wearing an old Mike Cubbage jersey.

Leave me the hell alone.

What a voice and what a way with words this old man I met today had. He was out for a stroll –on a lark, he said, just trying to stay loose and keep the juices jangling. Nice day for that sort of thing.

I hadn’t seen him around the neighborhood before. He sounded like a man who sat beside God’s bed and read Him stories to help Him sleep. I’ve honestly never heard such a voice, and would use the word mellifluous to describe it if it didn’t remind me of an entirely bogus high school English teacher with a ponytail. This, he said, reaching down to scratch my dog’s ears, is a fellow who has clearly done the Lord’s work. His magnificent skull and the mysteries it contains are purest perfection.

We chatted for quite some time, and every sentence he uttered seemed like a bright ribbon embroidered with words, slowly unfurling from his mouth and drifting out across the neighborhood on the breeze. I don’t, unfortunately, remember much else he said, so dazzled was I by his voice, but every word seemed so beautifully shaped and carefully chosen.

I didn’t want him to leave me. I should have invited him into my home and asked him to speak into a tape recorder, to intone a message of love to my wife, something I could hide away for her to find after I am dead.

He did, though, eventually go on his way. And I thought: wouldn’t it be nice to have even a few of that man’s lovely sentences in a jar of formaldehyde on my bedstand? Even now I am thinking about that idea, that image of those words floating beside me, undulating slowly like beautiful fish and keeping me company through the night. I like to imagine they would glow in the dark.