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.

The drama of the baseball playoff series this year was
dominated by the fierce and long-standing rivalry between
the Red Sox of Boston and the Yankees of New York—which
produced a small brawl in the Yankee bullpen at Fenway Park
that has since resulted in the filing of criminal
charges—and the “curse” that supposedly lay upon the
post-season play of both the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.
The great thing about the curse story was