It is often said that love and hatred are closely allied. Why does baseball so often have to remind us of this? I don't know that I've ever loved the game as much as I did at the end of last season. And my favorite team lost the World Series! (It's true that they'd won the last four out of five.) Something about the Fall Classic last year was beyond winning and losing; it smacked of Greek drama. Though the Yankees were vanquished by the Diamondbacks (few humiliations were sharper than seeing Randy Johnson scoring two runs as a batter in Game Six!), their late-inning heroics in games Four and Five, with New York City still reeling and the tattered Stars and Stripes flying above the Stadium, left my nerves permanently and pleasantly jangled. Baseball did for our nation what nothing else could do—a mere game brought healing and catharsis.

Enter Bud Selig, baseball's uncouth commissioner. He chose the week after the Series to call for the elimination of two teams before the start of this season (apparently with full consent of the owners), opening old wounds that bring back the misery of the 1994 strike. Although this was perhaps the only way that the Montreal Expos would ever become the talk of the off-season, the price has been heavy upon baseball fanhood. And deferring contraction at least until the end of the 2002 season seems to me merely to make matters increasingly ugly—the Expos lameduck journey is depressing before it has even begun, and the legal wrangling in Minnesota, with none other than Gov. Jesse Ventura in the midst, has taken on the flavor of WWF theatrics. Thus the game that wrought such pure passions from us in October has elicited enmity over the winter.

But baseball's troubles go much deeper. Rooting for the ...