Sport: Now You See Them, Now You Don't

The major league baseball players throw a knuckle ball

There was a strange stillness . . .It was a spring without voices . . . only silence lay over the fields . . .

­Rachel Carson, The Silent Spring

For baseball fans, the thought of springtime without the national pastime was at least as shocking as Rachel Carson's ghostly 1962 musing about environmental death in the season of new life. Spring without the crack of the bat, the call of the ump, the roar of the crowd! Only the players, of all people, shouting "St-e-e-rike!"

Such...