What a slide! Last year major-leaguers scored the fewest runs per game in 19 seasons. A top statistician says that's something to root, root, root for.(SPORTS)

Baseball is about homecoming," A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote. "It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home."

The eloquence of the late scholar and baseball commissioner stands in delightful contrast to the description of home plate in the game's rule book--"a five-sided slab of whitened rubber" in the form of a "17-inch square with two of the corners …