Trains are still the best conveyance for transporting a mood. Last week's destination was either the past or the future -- Chicago anyway, Wrigley Field. After two or three switchyards, a traveler gets turned around, and the sensation is of highballing one way and the other, backward and forward, in time.
The pity with which the old fedora-wearing baseball writers beheld their fresh replacements always seemed to have to do with missing trains. Seeing the country roll by in thatches of shadows, hearing Babe Ruth call all the redcaps "Stinkweed," were trivial elements of the coverage but critical parts of the...