Requiem for the Summer Game

Baseball is back? Alas, baseball is dying

Is this the year they canceled spring training? It might be going on somewhere, but to read the papers or watch the sportscasts, you wouldn't know it. Just a decade ago, it was almost obligatory for a writer to pad down in March to some funky Florida field and wax poetic about the summer game. Today you're lucky if you can find a single line of baseball coverage. Spring once meant the crack of the bat, the smell of the grass. Today it means college hoops, March Madness.

The barons of the game say baseball is back. "The game is more...

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