My Baseball Fantasy

These days we share a common Internet site that bears the misnomer "Tight Circle." It has proved to have almost the opposite effect, giving frequent rise to the question, "Will the circle be broken?" The original notion was to turn all our baseball discussions as well as our roto triumphs and tragedies into fodder for one extended group discussion. But as most of us are journalists, and thus incapable of restricting commentary to what we actually know or understand, we now stray—many would say barge—into subjects of religion, national politics, movies, literature, sex and Spitzer, subjects on which we are not necessarily well versed and seldom in agreement. "Idiot" and "fascist" are typical of the grand wit of our rejoinders.

In other words, each year baseball cannot arrive soon enough. But last Sunday, over Guinness and eggs, I was reminded not of our faults but of our virtues, not of our differences but of our shared reverence for the game of baseball and our fantasy world. There was a movement afoot to raise the stakes, a high-three-figure investment that stretched most of us when we began in the '80s but now, even as we approach our Social Security years, seems a rather modest sum. But the increase was voted down by a substantial margin. It was never about the money. It was always about the game. And as the day wound down, as the final suds slid down our throats, each of us was thinking exactly the same thing: not "may the best team win" but, assuredly, "may I, the best man, win!"

© 2008