It’s sunk in. The season is over. The winter is coming. Soon it will be very cold in New York. While part of me is depressed, another part is relieved. But I’m also excited to let my mind wander and delve into whatever part of baseball history that interests me. I’ve got at least a dozen good baseball books on my shelf waiting to be read, and a bunch more that I’m apt to peruse at any moment just for the hell of it. Which is what I did with The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers yesterday. It’s one of my favorite–if not my favorite–book by James. One bit that caught my attention was about the 1962 National League pennant race:

The Dodgers got ahead, and then they lost. In the mind of the typical sportswriter, when you get ahead youíre supposed to win. This is particularly true if you represent a media center, New York or Los Angeles, because to a large segment of the media, the story of any season is either going to be the story of how the Dodgers won, or the story of how the Dodgers lost