It is often said that love and hatred are closely allied. Why does baseball so often have to remind us of this? I don't know that I've ever loved the game as much as I did at the end of last season. And my favorite team lost the World Series! (It's true that they'd won the last four out of five.) Something about the Fall Classic last year was beyond winning and losing; it smacked of Greek drama. Though the Yankees were vanquished by the Diamondbacks (few humiliations were sharper than seeing Randy Johnson scoring two runs as a batter in Game Six!), their late-inning heroics in games Four and Five, with New York City still reeling and the tattered Stars and Stripes flying above the Stadium, left my nerves permanently and pleasantly jangled. Baseball did for our nation what nothing else could do—a mere game brought healing and catharsis.

Enter Bud Selig, baseball's uncouth commissioner. He chose the week after the Series to call for the elimination of two teams before the start of this season (apparently with full consent of the owners), opening old wounds that bring back the misery of the 1994 strike. Although this was perhaps the only way that the Montreal Expos would ever become the talk of the off-season, the price has been heavy upon baseball fanhood. And deferring contraction at least until the end of the 2002 season seems to me merely to make matters increasingly ugly—the Expos lameduck journey is depressing before it has even begun, and the legal wrangling in Minnesota, with none other than Gov. Jesse Ventura in the midst, has taken on the flavor of WWF theatrics. Thus the game that wrought such pure passions from us in October has elicited enmity over the winter.

But baseball's troubles go much deeper. Rooting for the Yankees—as I hate to be reminded, even as I celebrate the acquisition of Jason Giambi—means rooting for the wealthiest team in the sport, with the heftiest payroll and an outrageously deep revenue stream. And it is money that is at the root of baseball's woes, as the sport tries to deal with the very odd problem of an embarrassment of riches.

Indeed, the contraction debacle has obscured the real dilemma, the seemingly impassable divide between the owners and the players' union. November 7 of last year marked the expiration of the current labor contract between the owners and the players and the beginning of what threatens to become a protracted battle over how baseball's embarrassing riches will be distributed.

No play at the plate has ever generated the sort of collision that will transpire when the "sweeping changes" that Bud Selig claims are necessary for the health of the game, begin to take shape. Congress is currently deliberating once again the unique anti-trust exemption which has protected Major League Baseball since 1922, and though Selig opted out of testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 4, he did send his lawyer to publicly lament what the owners see as an untenable financial situation, citing losses in the hundreds of millions last year.

The average fan stands by baffled, witnessing an ambitious and stubborn players' union justifying salaries of $20 million a year as "defending market value," while owners who charge $35 for bad seats at stadiums that are often filled to overflowing, with television revenue doubling and gate income tripling, claim to be broke. Where might some sanity be found?

In books, of course. Books written by people who love the game of baseball unequivocally. The long-simmering crisis has inspired several well-known voices to seek a hearing—and I do mean "voices" literally, as a handful of baseball's signature broadcasters have written books on the state of the game over the last several years. Bob Costas and Joe Morgan, longtime colleagues in the NBC booth, have each offered their useful, albeit idiosyncratic, perspectives on the troubles that currently plague the game, and Tim McCarver, the Fox and longtime New York Mets analyst, has written a couple of books that deserve some attention, although McCarver's tone is decidedly more positive.

McCarver's The Perfect Season (1999), written with Danny Peary, grows out of the conviction—which he shares with Costas and with Morgan— that the 1998 season, particularly the sustained drama of the McGwire-Sosa home-run record chase, served as a redemptive moment for the game. If only baseball could bottle the ingredients of that wonderfully improbable year!

The exuberance McCarver displays in this series of essays is at times overwrought, but he has his reasons. As he writes in the introduction, "The sport of baseball is characterized by imperfections—remember that great hitters make outs seven of ten times—so, ironically, a 'perfect season' in baseball must include flaws and failures. What made 1998 so rewarding to fans, however, is that the players achieved so much as individuals and as a whole that the negatives virtually faded into the background. The flies in the ointment were killed off."