God invented baseball so we could enjoy our summer days--the sun and sky, the grass, and human company. I have just spent the weekend in the company of seven hundred baseball fans of the most serious stripe, the historians and statisticians of the Society for American Baseball Research.

It is my good fortune that the annual convention this year came to my home town of Boston, so I experienced my first SABR convention as a member of the host committee and staff. In other words, at full throttle. After four solid days of presentations, slide shows, panels, talks by umpires, scouts, and members of the media, and visits by Luis Tiant, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio, I was just about worn out as things began to wrap up on Sunday afternoon.

We had been addressed by curators from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown about the "Baseball as America" exhibit which is touring American cities and is in New York now. Did you know the catcher's mask was invented by a Harvard baseball player who wanted the catcher to be able to catch a third strike, as in those days the catcher stood well back of the plate? I had taken in presentations on ballparks, women baseball writers, and how base-stealers affect the performance at the plate of the batters who hit behind them. I learned the nicknames of the Des Moines, Iowa Western League team from the early part of the century (Undertakers, Politicians, Underwriters, Champs, and more).

I watched a game from 1967 from the archives of the New England Sports Museum. Funny how the wind-ups were so much more elaborate for pitchers then. And how the "stop" in the set position with runners on was so small that today it would be called a balk. How about those runners on second, all leading off directly in the baseline to third? Nowadays we would see them lead to the side of the bag, to keep it in their peripheral vision. Then, the runner had to repeatedly look behind him to see if the shortstop was sneaking in. And to think I was only five months old when the game was aired, in color, on NBC tv across the nation. Hubert Humphrey joined Ted Kennedy in the stands that day.

El Tiante told us about how when he got to the majors, he couldn't understand what his manager would say. So he would just smile and nod his head like he understood. Now his is pitching coach for the Lowell Spinners. A young Korean named Yoo has just joined the team, the first rung of the climb to the majors, and Tiant tries to talk to him and give him advice. He sees the kid smiling and nodding and thinks, he's just like me. And he doesn't understand a word I say.

The umpires say the deck is not stacked against women umpires anymore. And if more women would go to umpiring school, we'd see more of them (i.e. any of them) make it. Someday. And did you know that MLB has hired umpire overseers for each park, who report to MLB on the performance of umpires? Modern technology also allows them to measure within a half inch whether every pitch was a ball or a strike. The average major league ump will only miss 5-6 calls per game, and will receive a CD ROM of his performance after each game showing video of each pitch and whether the call was right or wrong.

And that's but a smattering of all the things I saw, did, and learned. You can see why, by Sunday, my brain was feeling rather full.

The final event of the weekend was to be a vintage base ball exhibition between the New York Mutuals, a traveling 19th century baseball re-creation team, and the "SABR Nine." (It turned out to be more like nineteen.) A field on the Boston Common was reserved in advance, and as I dragged my tired feet on the short walk from the hotel to the park, I could make out the green-billed caps of the Mutuals as they took some batting practice.

On the corner of Charles and Boylston stood a hot dog vendor. Her steam cart beckoned and a sudden golden flush of pleasure washed over me. Not the adrenaline rush of seeing a strike out with the bases loaded. Not the leaping exultation of watching a grand slam fly into the night. A simpler, more general contentment made me smile like a fool. I was about to sit and eat a hot dog and watch a baseball game. And that just seemed like the best thing in the world.