Here’s the thing about baseball, and all else: everything changes. Whether it’s the slow creep of glaciers dripping toward the sea, or the steady piling up of cut stones, rock upon rock until the wall reaches chest high, nothing is still. Sometimes change comes as quick and catastrophic as a line drive—hear the crack of wood displacing a sphere of leather, yarn, rubber, and cork; watch how it pushes the ball flat and then, just as quickly, forward. The action springs the left fielder from his squat, and the man’s metal spikes tear into the turf, kicking up tiny wedges of grass, sending them toward the sky.

Sure, I followed I-10 across the desert to write the story of one remarkable man, but baseball’s not that kind of game. It’s too long and complicated to say, He did this, he said that, then this happened. That sufficed when I was first working the beat, still wet behind the ears and liable to get lost on my way to the press room. Back then, it was Get the score, get the quote, add a little color, and file—162 times a year. (More if you were lucky and your team took any sort of postseason run. September, October, that was the only time the rest of the newsroom took us serious. And no editor was ponying up for spring ball—that’s what the wires were for.) I was such a kid, spooked by his own damn shadow, downright fearful of asking any kind of tough question, something that might be construed as disagreeable. Now, I’m no muckraker, and not setting out to take down a great man, but in this life things are complex, some questions are hard, and that’s why I drove to Arizona in the first place.

It’s not that those early reports of mine were totally off the mark. Ask any fan, and she’ll tell you there’s something satisfyingly linear about baseball: three strikes, three outs. Four bases, nine innings. A lineup, for chrissake—you don’t need to be an etymologist to see the meaning in that. But at the same time as that steady progression of three up, three down, then the next, then the next, it’s going around and around, cycling through the order, running around the bases. Things get parabolic. There’s the arc of up and down through the organization, from Single-A Carolina to the big time in Culver City, the tight arc of an infield-fly out and the majestic one of a game-winning homer. Charting the line gets mighty complicated: there are so many men playing together, so many more behind the scenes, coaching and cajoling and sometimes sabotaging the game’s progress, pulling the line until it goes bonkers, more like a dance chart than any sort of arrow.