For Joe and everyone not old enough to remember 1969, the reason I did not have an electronic calculator then was they had not been invented yet! The first time I ever saw one was in my last semester of college in the fall of 1972. In the fall of 1973 It took about an entire week’s take-home pay check to buy my first one, a Bowmar Brain. $80 for a 4-banger that could only add, subtract, multiply and divide. I figured Bowmar might hire me for an ad but as luck would have it, they declared bankruptcy around the time the millionth run publicity was breaking. They were killed by cheap Japanese competition. China is the new Japan–or maybe Japan was the old China.

Second, and quite obviously, the millionth run was based on only the American and National league because it was too late to do it any other way. Most people had never hear of (and still hadn’t heard of) defunct loops with names like the Players League and Union Association. For the record, all the commercial PR releases identified it as the millionth run in the history of the American and National Leagues, not in the history of MLB.

Just thought you might like to know.

Mark Sackler

I think baseball reached its zenith in October, 1988, with Kirk Gibson’s pinch homer in game one of the World Series. I mean, it epitomized everything that’s good about baseball: will to win, great scouting, trusting your team mate (okay, your scout) to give you the right advice, and swinging based on a scouting report and managing to connect despite a really serious injury. In no other sport could Kirk Gibson have begun to play a useful part given the extraordinarily rare knee injury he had. So that game, to me, is the peak, the best game in baseball, ever.

But I think the decline phase could well last for centuries.

I really don’t know how to explain it, but something about that piece darn near drove a 39 year old man to tears.

There truly is something about sports – not just baseball, of course, that can do that to a lot of us.

But usually only when it’s written about in such grand fashion as is your style.

Kudos, sir.

Actually, I do know what I am talking about. I spent most of my 13 years in marital arts punching and kicking at erratically moving targets. This is what I know:

1. None of the MMA people I have seen are appreciably faster than the fastest people I fought.

2. Having seen the 50 year old man I mentioned fight, I can tell you, he had no problem with moving people. It was like a cat with a toy. I have never seen someone with faster reflexes. I would be more afraid of running into him in a dark alley than 3 or 4 MMAs, terrifying as that is. (I am not exaggerating.)

3. Notice how MMA folks don’t wear much padding? It’s because they don’t hit that hard. What do you think boxers would look like at the end of a fight if they wore those tiny gloves?

4. Legs are stronger than arms (see 3).

5. If there is something MMA has over many of the people I’ve seen and fought, it’s training in grappling/wrestling. We didn’t get much of that as the style of Tae Kwon Do I was trained in (Chung Do Kwan) was primarily a speed/power martial art.

I could go on, but then I’d get into personal experience and sound even more arrogant than I already do. The only other thing I can say is that we were very careful (our rules were much more stringent than MMA), and people still ended up hospitalized on occasion. In professional, full contact martial arts, no match should ever last long, and frankly, if these guys really know what they are doing, then it’s a miracle that people don’t die all the time. Martial arts is a strange thing. A lot of people who have been doing it a long time take offense at the notion of it as a sport (they think of it as an art) and would sooner starve than compete in an MMA event. I don’t know that I can explain it with out going on for a much longer time, and this is, after all, a blog comment, so I’m going to stop now.