George Vecsey

We all understand the economics of the Super Bowl - 10 or 12 minutes of the ball in motion will be stretched into three and a half hours or more of money-making commercials.

It is hard to imagine the World Series being held in the sweet hazy sunshine of late September rather than the sour night air of late October, but that is precisely what has transpired in baseball over the past 50 years, a deterioration from light to darkness.

I proposed abolishing boxing because it was bad for the brain, but boxers were generally so decent that I loved being around the gyms.

Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people's favorite team.

I've seen elbows that broke eye sockets. I've seen a German goalkeeper just level a French guy. His teammates thought he was dead lying on the ground. This was in 1982 at my first World Cup. But a bite is outside any kind of contact collision: dirty foul play. A bite is a bite.

Some of us love hockey not just for its ferocity and skill but for its underlying code of civility off the ice.

I love Major League Soccer, covered the first game in 1996 in a funky stadium in San Jose, and I applaud just about every move that its commissioners, Garber and Doug Logan, have made.

I love hockey because of the respect for history and for the game itself.

I love Boston. I love Fenway Park. I love Red Sox history. But in no way am I a Red Sox fan.

When I was working on the unauthorized biography 'Stan Musial: An American Life,' which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

The Greatest Living Yankee is Whitey Ford, who came out of Aviation High School, which was then in Manhattan, and helped pitch the Yankees to victory in the 1950 World Series when he was 21.

Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River.