Bad Baseball Writing

A sentence that should never appear in an article about baseball and the writer's youth: "That was the summer that my friends and I lost our innocence." There it is today in the Wall Street Journal. Ever since (and before) Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer," otherwise decent writers have tried to use baseball as a metaphor for... something or other. Biggest culprits: Donald Hall, Bernard Malamud, George Will, Philip Roth. What do these guys have in common? Great writers, terrible writers about baseball.