Although I have noticed in myself a decline of interest in sporting competition which seems to have proceeded pari passu with the decline in my ability to take part in it, I got hooked in October on the World Series—nowadays a misnomer, left over from the Barnum-style puffery of baseball’s infancy. But in turning with the renewal of my long-dormant interest to the sports pages of my newspapers, I noticed with a new appreciation that sports writers were only doing in a more concentrated form what all journalists do, all the time. That is, they look at the same few events with an eye for extracting from them the best story they can find. They must take a simple binary system—either you win or you lose—and convert any given result into an epic drama of triumph or tragedy. Even in sports where a draw or tie is possible, one team may be seen as being on the way up for not losing and the other on the way down for not winning.

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