Up, the seabed climbed, until the Arizona landscape looked more like East Africa, a loose and grassy savannah, dust-brown and baked. Up, the seabed climbed, until the last corals were gone, the fish scratched from the order. They were replaced by mastodons, by giant ground sloths, by bullpen-size beavers. And dinosaurs: a duck-billed hadrosaur darts between the bases as a long-necked sauropod ambles the concourse like a lazy peanut vendor. But no lions yet—the MGM lion, the team’s inspiration, would need more time to cook. And no humans. A few million years would have to pass before the giant footsteps of the titanothere could be shrunk down to a man’s size twelve, to say nothing of Jason Goodyear’s forthcoming signature line. I’d tell Jason to think about that the next time he sinks a boot in the warning track after a downpour. Look at the tiny impression your cleat makes, Goody. Think of those ancient footsteps, and remember: you are a speck.

Not that he needs any more lectures right about now, especially not from a sportswriter whom he only ever addressed in press conferences as “the older fellow with the ’stache.” How quick does a face like mine fade? Does a guy like him notice when a guy like me goes missing, when half the press corps is wiped out in eighteen months, replaced by tweet-happy rooks whose only experience is bumbling through the scores on college radio? Theirs make my early dispatches seem like Chekhov; the new form makes this story, the long route, feel that much more necessary.

But I digress. As the land rose, the Pacific plate pulled west and northwest, taking the taffy-soft plateau of Arizona’s continental shelf with it. Stretching, stretching, stretching, until the crust was so thin that a mountain range was able to push up through it like an arc of pimples on a teenage rookie’s oily skin. That thrust of rock was followed by a flow of basaltic lava down the slope as smooth as motor oil, lava that laid a new floor across the plateau.

I know what you’re thinking: Why the history lesson, chief? What does a new mountain have to do with a major league club? Rocks for jocks? Think about this: If the earth’s skin is so thin, imagine that of a man. If the planet’s minute shifting can thrust a whole continent off kilter, imagine the skin of a person, even a strong one. Thin as a gum wrapper, as tissue.