We're a little over a week into the 2004 season, and it's great to be back in baseball mode again. Cecilia and I spent the winter in the Dominican Republic working on our switch hitting. Wait, wrong. We actually spent the winter watching the Ken Burns Baseball documentary series. Well, we're not quite finished, but we're close.

It's actually a fairly good documentary, though it can be a bit New York-centric at times. We've just finished the 1950s and heard all about the powerhouse Yankee teams from that decade and the moving of the Dodgers and Giants out to the west coast. It also struck me that those moves also signal the end of the mythological classic baseball era. In other words, the classic image of baseball-as-Americana begins sometime in the late 1910s and ends in 1958. Exactly in 1958, when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Even today, when people talk about the good old days of baseball, and you ask them, "exactly when were the good old days?" they can tell you: 1958. It's not a nostalgia that I buy into very deeply (my team, the Padres didn't get elevated to major league status until 1969, so I don't pine for the glorious fifties), but it is one that is constantly recirculated.