A month of baseball remains.
"We just had a bad month of baseball," catcher Brian McCann said.
March madness bleeds into April, which transforms into Tiger mania (otherwise known as Tiger Woods blotting out the Masters), which begets hyperventilating over the first month of baseball season, which will mean nothing by the second month of baseball season, leads to N.F.L. draft overanalysis and then Tiger mania will be coming to the United States Open at Pebble Beach!
In this long month of the baseball postseason, now over, there was a sweet energy emanating from the Anaheim Angels, a baseball team that had never won a pennant, much less a World Series, in its 42 years of changing names, ballparks, contours, colors, managers.
In May, one of baseball's greatest voices, Ernie Harwell, died of cancer at 92, and thousands paid their respects to him inside the front gates at Comerica Park, where he lay in repose.
That put in motion the most bizarre four-month stretch of baseball in the Mets' history -- a stretch that ended with the Mets facing Atlanta for the National League pennant.
If Strawberry, who turns 38 next month, is out of baseball for a year, he will not have the routine that is so important to him.
Last year it signed a ten-year, $2 billion hockey deal for its sports network, in the hope it would bring more fans to the channel, and fill the gap between the end of American football at the end of January and the start of baseball in April.
The Montreal Expos received a four-year stay of execution last August as part of baseball's labor agreement.
Since an investigation by the Albany County district attorney's office into a ring of clinics and pharmacies came to light in February, a number of baseball players have been named in connection with shipments of performance-enhancing drugs.
The stadium itself is an airy, modern structure, with a brutalist cement façade that eschews the nostalgia of many of the recent ballparks — correctly, since, as Steve Coll wrote in April, the history of baseball in Washington leaves little to be nostalgic about.
