The most intriguing at-bat of 2007 is leaking into 2008. You can sense it by the way a 25-year-old wannabe struts through his February workouts. You can sense it by the way a 40-year-old shoulder shrugs at the line of questioning. You can sense it by the way a Hall of Famer is uncomfortably stuck in the middle. And you can sense it by the way a filthy rich man stares into space.

On Sept. 29, 2007, Tony Gwynn Jr., for all practical purposes, knocked Tony Gwynn Sr.’s team out of the playoffs. But it’s much crueler than that. He did it with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth — against his Uncle Trevor. He did it with the champagne on ice and the Colorado Rockies on life support. He did it against the franchise that clothed and fed him and against a fan base that, 81 days a year, walks down Tony Gwynn Drive to the turnstiles. He did it as the only son of San Diego’s favorite son. And this is how he pays everyone back?

But to understand Sept. 29, 2007, you need to scoot back one day to Sept. 28.

That night, in a corridor of Miller Park in Milwaukee, Tony Gwynn Jr. asked San Diego Padres owner John Moores for a favor.

Wait until you hear it.

*****

The most intriguing at-bat of 2007 has its roots in 1997. Back then, a boney 15-year-old kid named Anthony Gwynn, otherwise known as Little T, sat at the same locker every day in the Padres’ clubhouse:

Not his dad’s.

Trevor Hoffman’s.

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I have a few friends who care about writing as much as I do. Thank goodness, too. One of them emailed me this quote from Michael Kruse the other day. My friend  and I had been in a conversation a couple of days earlier about the craft, and he thought I would be interested in what Kruse, a staff writer for The St. Petersburg Times, had to say about daily journalism and writing well.

Here is Kruse’s comment:

“Reporting is not walking with a tape recorder or a notebook and a ballpoint pen. It is not transcribing. It’s not talking to as many people as possible. It is not collecting quotes. Reporting is all that, or can be, but it’s also observing and thinking and recognizing themes and ultimately earning the ability to say what there is to say. Reporting is work.”

Kruse, who has earned a closetful of awards for writing, is right, and I’m glad he offered his thoughts on journalism.

Now, I’m not certain where my friend found Kruse’s comments. In the Internet world, they could have been anywhere — or anybody’s if they aren’t really Kruse’s words. Not that it matters, because whether the comments are Kruse’s or not, they do speak loudly to what journalism is.

The profession, of course, has never been about tape recorders or ballpoint pen and spiral notebooks, though they do play parts in what the profession is about. Journalism is what all writing is about, whether novel writing or essay writing or journalism: Writing is thinking.

Sportswriters who understand that fact find themes to write about. They unearth stories everywhere they dig. Walk outside the press box during a rain delay, and what do they see: Vendors taking a break and bemoaning lost revenue, ushers working to make things comfortable for fans or the general manager in the media dining room killing time.

Is that what’s happening (or has happened) on the field? No, but sports isn’t all about what happens on the field. It’s about what goes on in the owner’s box, in the general manager’s office, in the pen or batting cage. It’s about the players on rehab assignment; it’s about players who are in the community, pitching in to help others.

Sports is about humans doing what humans do: live and work and play, and cry and hurt and laugh, and scream and fight and feud. People enjoy the thrill of competing, and people enjoy sitting in and watching competition unfold.

In 1975, the year I graduated from Marquette University as it happens, Joan Baez got her own back, gently, at Bob Dylan, for whatever happened in their complicated relationship back in what we geezer folk like to call “The Sixties,” in a lovely song called “Diamonds and Rust.” At one point, she challenges him to identify the reason he called her, which he insists was not nostalgic. “Give me another word for it,” she sings to him, slipping a velvet-handled shiv into his ribs. “You who are so good with words.”

The thing is, there has to be a better word for the way a longtime feeling of community rises unbidden when the right song pops up on a jukebox, or how I can still tell to this day the difference between the way yeast smells and the way hops smell, or the way the chill wind comes off the big lake. Or, as was the case this past weekend, how I felt just looking at the big, round dormitory I first entered four decades ago this past autumn. It is an odd sort of belonging, alive again. And it is not nostalgia, which is simple and marketable and, in so many ways, sterile and dead.

The big, round dormitory is called McCormick Hall, and it sits on the corner of 16th Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, across the street from a bar that is now called Caffrey’s, but which I first knew as The Ardmore in the days in which I lived in the big, round dormitory. (The Ardmore specialized in something called “The Vulcan Mind Probe,” which you could use to run a snowmobile in a pinch, and generally caused undergraduates to behave illogically.) I saw it as I drove to the freeway that leads from Milwaukee to Madison, where Marquette was playing Wisconsin in a battle of two top-20 basketball programs on a wet, chilled afternoon. The game lived up to its billing, albeit in a ragged and eccentric fashion.

Wisconsin is a big, talented team, and extraordinarily gifted at milking the shot clock and dropping a 3-pointer just before time expires, which is an exhausting strategy to defend. “They make you play the last 10 seconds of the clock harder than the first 25,” Marquette coach Buzz Williams would later explain. For himself, Williams has an intriguing mix of young and old players, including a point guard named Darius Johnson-Odom who has a chest like Vinnie Johnson, and who bops around like vintage Earl Monroe, all herky-jerky, like a marionette of a drunken puppeteer. He’s going to spend all year trying to blend veterans like Johnson-Odom and dreadlocked forward Jae Crowder in with new players, especially an irrepressible scoring guard named Todd Mayo.

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BUENOS AIRES – Jorge Marcelo Ramia was talking as he, his friend Lucia Garcia Labat and I were in a taxi cab and coming from the two baseball fields he had built in a park on the edge of the city.

I listened as Ramia shared his hopes for baseball in Argentina. He was saying how optimistic he was that baseball here, in the heart of futbol country, would prosper. Ramia said he’s made the success of baseball a measure of his success in life.

He was in the middle of a sentence when, as if on cue, a song blared through the radio. I asked the driver to turn up the volume. I shook my head in disbelief as this ‘87 song by Starship played. For no song could have fit into our conversation better than these lyrics:

And we can build this thing together, stand in stone forever, nothing’s gonna stop us now.

Surely, nothing’s gonna stop Jorge Marcelo Ramia from building baseball in Argentina.

“Yes, he is crazy,” Garcia said in her halting English. “My friends don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”

Ramia called his obsession with seeing baseball thrive in Argentina his mission. He called his effort to ensure it does “the project.”

In fact, it is his life. All of what Ramia does these days is tied to baseball. He’s abandoned his work with tennis and basketball — sports that allowed him to travel the world to promote. He might still have been with one of those sports had Ramia not gotten hooked on baseball.

He’s hooked — badly. He has his reasons.

At 51, he never had kids of his own. But he loves kids. Always has loved ‘em. He’s gotten pleasure out of seeing them enjoy sports.

Maybe in them, he said, he’s living out his youth again. Maybe, he said, he’s enjoying things in their lives that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t able to enjoy in his.

In his boyhood, Ramia wasn’t able to enjoy baseball. In the 1950s and ‘60s, nobody played baseball here. Nobody. He didn’t fall in love with the sport until five years ago.

He fell hard for it.

Baseball has become Ramia’s mistress. He spends most of his days with her — and a good chunk of his money, too.

“The project — it drives him,” Garcia said as the taxi rolled through Buenos Aires.

The project drives him each day to the two ballparks he’s built. It drives him to talk to city fathers about building more ballparks. It drives him to recruit like-minded people who share his vision of what baseball can be in a country that worships futbol.

“We can see everything,” he said of baseball’s future here. “Some people can see nothing. That is not my problem.”

He does have a problem — don’t all dreamers, though? — in trying to grow the game here. For it will take Ramia’s undying commitment and help from others to see his dream become a reality.

That reality is, he said, a steady flow of Argentine talent to the Majors.

First, Ramia has a more modest objective: seeing a team of Argentine boys at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa.

From those boys will come the Major Leaguers. From those men in the bigs will come fulfillment for Ramia, who will have seen his hard work produce the results he’s sought. But those results won’t occur overnight. They’ll take time.

It will happen. Ramia’s certain of it. It will happen sooner than many people might think. Ramia’s certain of that, too.

Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month or maybe next year or maybe in the next two or three or four years, he’ll be able to reflect on his beginning days of “the project” and see something that’ll carry his imprint.

On his deathbed, he’ll know that he’s left something good behind for Argentines, he said. It’ll all be reflected on his tombstone, Ramia said.

“When the moment arises,” he said, “it will say: a warrior, a dreamer and stupid.”

Let’s say I’m 25 years old. (Play along, please.) Let’s say I’ve put in three or four years at my local newspaper and I’m ready to move on. On December 17, 2010, searching for the next adventure, I go to JournalismJobs.com. There I see the Helena Independent Record is looking for a sports editor. The salary range is $30,000 to $35,000.

The newspaper’s ad reads: “The Independent Record, an award-winning 15,000-circulation daily in state capital Helena, Montana, seeks a dynamic sports editor with excellent leadership, writing and design skills to lead its four-person staff in this sports powerhouse city in the heart of the Northern Rockies.”

I’m thinking, Montana?

“When you aren’t working, enjoy the myriad of recreational opportunities Helena has to offer in hiking, mountain biking, fly-fishing, skiing, boating and many more.”

I’m thinking, They’re selling fly-fishing?

The ad also says: “This fast-paced newspaper needs a self-starter who can make an immediate contribution to achieving a high level of excellence in the print and online products with compelling sports page design, enterprising sports news and feature reports, and multimedia presentation at helenanir.com.”

Better, sounds ambitious.

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It was an unusual venue for watching a Super Bowl. I was in Buenos Aires in 2008, surrounded mainly by transplanted Americans as the New England Patriots and New York Giants treated television viewers to one of the most memorable NFL games in history.

I had gone to Shoeless Joe’s El Alamo, a sports bar for expats in the Recoleta neighborhood, with a gang of people I had befriended during the month I spent in Argentina. I met them all at a language school I was attending, a place I went in hopes of learning Spanish. Most of the people I met were there for the same purpose, although I’m guessing they had much more success in mastering Spanish than I did.

But our language lessons didn’t fill the days. At tops, these classes lasted two hours, which gave all of us the rest of the summer day to explore Buenos Aires and experience the Argentine culture.

We didn’t hesitate to do so.

For we found plenty to experience in a city that has earned itself the nickname of “the Paris of South America.” If Paris is anything like Buenos Aires, I want to experience it as well. I found it hard to believe that Paris isn’t the “Buenos Aires of Europe.”

In the world of big cities, no place can possibly have the feel, pulse and warmth of Buenos Aires. The city is a mix of cultures – a racial melting pot in its truest sense that has stitched the ethnic heritages of diverse groups into a colorful tapestry. The words that people see on the Statue of Liberty could well fit on the “Obelisk” that serves as the North Star, a beacon guiding visitors through downtown Buenos Aires.

The city is more than sports bars, frightening cab rides and a gathering spot for foreigners. It is a place filled with history and style – a city with a swashbuckler’s flair. Buenos Aires has its quirks, too.

What city of more than 10 million people doesn’t?

Think I’m kidding? Well, try riding the rickety “A” line of the Subte (about 30 cents) to Plaza de Mayo-Carabobo and you’ll see a side of Buenos Aires that’s as gritty as any area of in Manhattan or Mumbai.

And like Manhattan and Mumbai, Buenos Aires has its distinct neighborhoods – even more of them than Manhattan. For Buenos Aires has a large footprint, one that stretches east and west, north and south.

Want to see colorful tenements, rubble and the hard-edged existence of the prideful “porteños”?

Then visit La Boca.

Fancy the nightlife?

Hit Las Canitas, Palermo and Zona Centro neighborhoods. You will  find everything there from the zoo to tango dancing in the streets to theaters and world-class museums.

How about good eats?

The cuisine in Buenos Aires ranges from Armenian to Indian to Thai, although if you’re looking for a Wendy’s, a White Castles or a Burger King, keep on lookin’. I didn’t find a one, but who travels outside the United States in hopes of eating on the cheap at a McDonald’s?

People come to Argentina for the meat. Argentina is steak country, and Morton’s or Peter Luger’s would do its diners a favor if it could offer a steak as tender and as succulent as you’d find in Buenos Aires.

Yet what makes Buenos Aires what the city is are the porteños, the Argentine people. They enjoy their lives, and they spend more time living it than thinking about it.

And that’s as much as anything else the reason they helped fill El Alamo two years ago watch this decidedly American sport. The Super Bowl has long been a signature event for Americans; the game is, however, simply a mere curiosity to Argentines.

But there the Argentines were this summer night, shoulder to shoulder in El Alamo with foreigners, watching on HDTV a game that didn’t resemble their football in any way. Yet they seemed to enjoy the game as much as the foreigners did.

Not that the Argentines understood the game. I doubt they did. But pour enough pints of Quilmas or Scotch ale down a man’s throat, and even curling might have its appeal.

On the eve of another Super Bowl, I expect the porteños will be bellying up to the wooden bar inside El Alamo, laughing and drinking and smiling and celebrating with their foreign friends.

I long to be there with them.

Not a single thing a sportswriter will do satisfies a reader’s appetite more than a piece that captures — to borrow a phrase from “The Wide World of Sports” — “the thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat.”

Ask any person who has written sports stories, and he will tell you the game story is the calling card of his profession. It’s always been that way, too – long before the icons of this journalistic era ever wrote a word.

It’s the news, stupid!

As Bruce Garrison, a journalism professor, wrote in his book Sports Reporting, “Game coverage has never been the only aspect of sportswriting, but it continues to be the foundation of most sports sections.”

I’ve quoted Garrison here simply to reiterate my point. Yet as fundamental to sports journalism as the “gamer” is, why do so many young sportswriters handle the task poorly? Why do so few journalism programs not bother to teach the fine art of the gamer?

I can find no acceptable answer for the latter question. As for the former, my view is that sportswriters today look at the game story as easy, and they don’t stress it the way they stress and fret the feature story. I also think young sportswriters – and some old ones, too — don’t show up at an event with a plan of attack or with much research behind them.

Broadly speaking, sportswriters don’t know what the game story is supposed to accomplish, which is a gigantic mistake that all but dooms their work to mediocrity.

And what is a gamer?

Well, the gamer is not a blow-by-blow account of what led to victory – or defeat. If anything, it’s an analysis or a think piece.

That’s essentially the philosophy that Thomas Boswell, a gifted baseball writer for The Washington Post, espouses. In an essay for Professor Melvin Mencher’s News Reporting and Writing, Boswell advises young sportswriters that the best way – or right way — to see a game is to look at it from a player’s perspective.

Here’s what Boswell says specifically about the art of writing the baseball gamer (his perspective, however, applies to any type of game story):

Judge slowly: “Never judge a player over a unit of time shorter than a month … you must see a player hot, cold, and in between before you can put the whole package together.”

Assume everybody is trying reasonably hard: “ … giving 110 percent … would be counterproductive for most players. … Usually something on the order of 80 percent effort is about right.

Forgive even the most grotesque physical error: “It’s assumed that every player is physically capable of performing every task asked of him. If he doesn’t, it’s never his fault. His mistake is simply regarded as part of a professional’s natural margin of error.”

Judge mental mistakes harshly: “The distinction as to whether a mistake has been made ‘from the neck up or neck down’ is always drawn.”

Pay more attention to the mundane than the spectacular: “The necessity for consistency usually outweighs the need for the inspired.”

Pay more attention to the theory of the game than to the outcome of the game: Don’t let your evaluation be swayed too greatly by the final score. “If a team loses a game but has used its resources properly … then that team is often able to ignore defeat utterly. Players say, ‘We did everything right but win.’ “

Keep in mind that players always know best how they’re playing: “At the technical level, they seldom fool themselves – the stakes are too high.”

Stay ahead of the action, not behind it or even neck and neck with it: “Remember that the immediate past is almost always a prelude.”

I find no reason to quarrel with Boswell’s perspective. His viewpoints speak well to how a sports journalist ought to approach the writing life in the press box, which can be a pressure-packed place to produce high art.

Yet stylish prose can be crafted from a seat in the press box, particularly when writers have a solid understanding of the ins and outs of their sport.

In my opinion, I also think it’s helpful if sportswriters understood their audience well. While I don’t believe any sportswriter is writing for the readers (a point William Zinsser’s stress in his book On Writing Well), I do believe he (or she) must understand whom those readers tend to be.

At MLB.com, for example, the site’s audience is a mix of casual fans, closet historians and seam-heads, and that mix presents a challenge for beat writers in terms of writing gamers.

Overall, the approach to gamers at MLB.com calls for more of a second-day story or, to use a more familiar term, a feature lead. The world of baseball moves too swiftly to saddle finicky readers with play-by-play and a sprinkling of mundane quotes in game stories.

If that’s all MLB.com can give its readers, they will stop coming back to the site because they know they can get this nuts-and-bolts stuff on the ESPNews ticker or elsewhere.

One of the senior editors at MLB.com put it this way: “We have to write gamers that put our finger on the pulse of the team and keeps it there. Our gamers need to tell diverse readership: What’s going on with this particular team? How did this single game affect the journey it’s on through this long, grinding six-month trek?

“Moreover, what is the goal of the season in the broader, deeper journey of a franchise? For a team, say, like the Kansas City Royals, the season’s about development, not wins and losses, and identifying key pieces around whom you can build a championship team. For a team like the Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Indians, the season’s about putting it together after years of rebuilding and breaking through to the postseason. For a team like the Detroit Tigers or Chicago White Sox or St. Louis Cardinals, it’s playoffs or bust.”

The editor went on to say that writers at MLB.com should — in fact, have to — reflect those deeper journeys in their game coverage. The play-by-play/how they scored stuff is information the readers likely already have. A writer only needs enough play-by-play in his or her story for readers to get the gist of what decided the game’s outcome. And beyond that, the writer has to give the readers much, much more insight.

Otherwise, what the writer does is nothing more than what readers can get from an AP story or some other wire service. They have no reason to visit MLB.com regularly if it can offer no more than the pedestrian prose found in an Associated Press story.

More than a decade ago, I ran across a handout that Dan Jenkins, a respected sportswriter and the author of “Fast Copy,” wrote about covering games. After reading his handout, I was struck by what he had to say. Here’s part of what Jenkins wrote:

“In any sports event, there is always a key moment, a big play which turns the tide. Seize on that moment. Hammer it. Kick it to death. It is worth sacrificing some play-by-play to do this and add ‘depth’ to your story.”

He is right, of course. Essentially, he’s talking about analyzing the game. Take the turning point and make that your story’s angle. Get comments to back up your view of what happened on the field, and, above all, keep your copy clutter-free.

So as you can see, writing the gamer is more than what many most sportswriters think it is, and it uses many of the same principles that J-schools teach for writing news stories, says Karen Brown Dunlap, director of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

“The major difference is that sportswriters must stress interpretation, how and why, more than in basic news stories,” Brown Dunlap says in Carol Rich’s Writing and Reporting News. “Good sportswriters try to do that by setting the tone and developing their stories with a theme.”

You take me more seriously than sometimes I take myself,” David Stern said during the lockout, and he’s been saying the same thing, or at least acting it out, for 25 years. It’s the key to his whole persona. Stern is the tyrant-as-entertainer, the mob boss who winks while he’s calling in the hit. He’s always kidding when he seems serious, but he’s always deadly serious when he’s kidding. Having decided that one of his tasks is to chaperone a skittish (white) public through an intimidating (black) sports league, he’s cast himself simultaneously as the cop who keeps you safe and the clown who reminds you that really, it’s only a movie.

For a long time, the two pillars of David Stern’s commissionership were his air of absolute authority and the sense of easy whimsy with which he inhabited it. Other sports commissioners were functionaries or bureaucrats: Paul Tagliabue was a responsible steward more than a dynamic leader, Bud Selig was a slack-haired joke. But when Stern took the stage to his annual chorus of boos at the NBA draft, he radiated the amused self-confidence of someone who knows he’s invincible. That’s OK, it’s only a game, his smile seemed to say, and everyone knows no one fucks with me. His perspective was always larger than yours, which meant he could afford to be patient with you — even if you hated him, you just couldn’t see the whole picture. It also meant that if he decided to kneecap you,1 you might never understand his reasons, but either way you weren’t getting up.

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The era of instant communication has brought with it two overriding verities: We have the ability to let loose our thoughts practically the instant we have them. And we have the corresponding responsibility to keep our inner editor on standby alert during every waking minute.

Unfortunately, and to our peril, the second occasionally fails to keep up with the first. That is true of anyone who has access to an email account or a cellphone, and it is especially true for those of us who make our living as communicators. Once it’s out there, it’s OUT there — and no amount of attempted deletions, apologies, excuses or modern technology can take it back.

That sad fact led to a painful decision Plain Dealer editors had to make last week.

Tony Grossi, who had covered the Cleveland Browns at this newspaper for roughly two decades, was removed from the beat on Tuesday by Editor Debra Adams Simmons, Managing Editor Thom Fladung and Sports Editor Roy Hewitt after an ill-considered Tweet went unintentionally viral.

Grossi had typed a message, which he termed “a smart-(aleck) remark to a colleague,” that called Browns owner Randy Lerner “a pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.”

But instead of sending a text message only to its intended recipient, he hit the wrong button and sent it out to his 15,000-plus Twitter followers.

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Peter King didn’t particularly want to write a weekly online column and he certainly wasn’t interested in Twitter. He had a full-time job covering the NFL for Sports Illustrated, thank you, and that was quite enough.