From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

What is it about baseball that commands the attention of grownup men? Some might ask the identical question about our other national pastime, politics. Contributor Walter Shapiro, author of this week's lament on the parlous state of the major leagues, has had ample experience with both obsessions. He nearly won a primary for Congress in Michigan in 1972 and was later a speechwriter for President Carter. His assignments since joining TIME in 1987 have been mostly in politics, including months last year tracking Bill Clinton.

While on Clinton's trail, Shapiro slipped away from the press pack to catch 15 ball games. He wasn't the only one. "I'm surprised at the number of political reporters who are passionate baseball fans," he says. "I think it has to do with small boys and numbers." He got hooked on baseball statistics at age eight and was drawn as well to election-return tables. He had already been notified by the Little League coaches of Norwalk, Connecticut, that he was fated to fandom rather than stardom on the field.

The boyhood baseball hobby died out, but Shapiro, like many others, rediscovered it in adulthood. The original attraction in his case was the Baltimore Orioles of the late 1970s. Now Shapiro is more Bird-brained than ever, since Baltimore has erected the neo-nostalgic Camden Yards field, which he saluted in his last baseball opus for TIME in 1991.

Shapiro is eight years into a related addiction, Rotisserie League Baseball, invented by LIFE managing editor Dan Okrent and named for a defunct Manhattan restaurant. This week Shapiro joins 11 otherwise sane "club owners" at a tavern for a fantasy auction of every player in the American League. The pennant winner shows the best aggregate statistics at season's end. Shapiro hopes that reporting for this week's story will give him a scouting edge.

Unlike politics, Shapiro says, covering baseball "teaches you the greatest gift for a writer or reporter: humility." While on his spring-training rounds, he found himself at a St. Petersburg, Florida, game, seated with 20 scouts. "I could hear them murmur about things I didn't see and whisper things I didn't understand." Shapiro believes that politicians would benefit from a similar immersion in humility: "It might be a wonderfully leveling experience for the egos of political leaders if for one campaign season they, like ballplayers, allowed reporters to interview them while they were half- undressed."