You know that terrible feeling you have when you hear that long-married friends are getting divorced? I have felt something like that many times in the last few years when personal acquaintances or writers I’ve read with great pleasure announce their terminal disenchantment with baseball—Major League Baseball, that is, which I have followed passionately since 1954, when I was six years old. At that time, I was living in Pomona, California, with my mother, my grandmother, and my younger brother. Mom and Grandma weren’t remotely baseball fans (though Mom later became a devout convert, thanks not least to Vin Scully), and Rick was still too young (soon he was a fellow lover of the game). But the world has changed a lot since then, for better and for worse, and baseball has changed with it—to the extent that many formerly devoted fans have soured on it, while many younger people have never connected with it in the first place.