The world of which Roger Kahn writes in The Boys of Summer ended less than a quarter-century ago, and its continuity, statistically and intellectually apparent, is an illusion of symbolic logic in which baseball seems to be the same old game because the measurements of the diamond have not changed.

In truth, the Brooklyn Dodger team which was Kahn's to cover for the Herald Tribune was the last leap of the flame of romance in baseball, as the Tribune was the last fiercely individualist newspaper. Measurements in sport and journalism are now so changed that comparisons are not only odious but meaningless.

The Dodger Corporation, by the legal thinking which decrees that a corporation is a person, is technically alive and operates on the west coast. No logic can give life to the Tribune, and yet Kahn, carrying the material object of a baseball glove which he got...