“Despite the perennial warnings of baseball Cassandras, time has yet to pass baseball by. What remains to be seen is not whether the game will survive, but how Americans in a rapidly changing world will again reinterpret and reinvent their national pastime.”

The conclusion to Jules Tygiel’s elegant meditation, “Past Time: Baseball as History,” isn’t just for Americans. The Irish blogger and soccer devotee known as Fredorrarci surely would be interested after expounding on The Classical about his admiration for the sport’s sense of its own past.

He writes this as he watches Ken Burns’ lauded  “Baseball” film, and his closing flourish is especially worth noting:

“I’ve got my first real feel for the heft of baseball history. That’s another way in which sport can feel appealingly bigger than yourself. It’s a powerful thing to step into something that’s existed for so long relative to your own puny span that it may as well have been going forever, and for all you know may continue indefinitely. That can be dangerous thinking, because a sport is just a culture, and cultures are fragile things that get born and dead like nobody’s business. But that’s just why a sense of history is important. My principle sporting passion, soccer, seems to be in the process of shedding its memory, believing itself to be an invincible megabeing that sprung from nothing, fully mega, around 1992. I don’t know enough about baseball to know whether, for all its apparent history-fetishism, it suffers from the same thing these days. I may be wrong, but it seems to have a better sense of where it’s come from than soccer does.”

He should know that baseball’s last existential crisis, on the heels of the 1994 strike that cancelled the World Series, left many fans revolted, forever swearing off the game. But as was illustrated by last night’s walkoff playoff finishes (especially for Yankees and A’s fans), the thrilling immediacy of events feeds the unbroken loop of history.

“Sport’s continuity is one of its most attractive qualities, but we should feel that it’s eternal while knowing that it’s not. There’s the false consolation of eternity, and there’s the consolation of false eternity, and a thin line between them.”

As I felt a couple of decades ago at the start of my immersion into global soccer, I hope this is also the beginning of a beautiful exploration.

Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports was first with the news on Monday night that the Texas Rangers won the rights to negotiate with Japanese pitching sensation Yu Darvish.

The defending American League champions bid a record $51.7 million and have 30 days to sign Darvish. If they don’t Darvish stays with the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Rangers get their money back.

The Angels have plunked down $254 for Albert Pujols and signed C.J. Wilson, the Rangers’ top starter, for $77.5 million. If Texas can work out terms with Darvish, some estimates have this move costing the club $100 million, and possibly more.

Every winter the eye-popping numbers for free agents grow larger. But for a pitching arm untested against major league hitting, and in The Ballpark at Arlington that’s considered hitting friendly, the real matter here is risk.

Given the example of Daisuke Matsuzaka, who cost the Red Sox $51 million five years ago, some are already issuing “buyer beware” calls. Darvish may have a fabulous arm, but it is a pitching arm.

Rangers, you’re on the clock.

Bravo to Sally Jenkins a couple of weeks ago for calling the farcical prosecution of Barry Bonds for what it was while it was going on. And double bravo to Roger Cossack and Art Spander post-factum for saying the same thing on “Outside the Lines” on Thursday.

Even George Dorhmann argues that the jury, after being unable to reach a verdict on three other counts:

“. . . found Bonds guilty of rambling, of dancing around a question, of being (for anyone who has ever interviewed him can attest) Barry Lamar Bonds.”

Yet the feigned moral outrage from The Tribe is sucking up far too much of the oxygen. Here’s a breath of fresh air:

(video h/t Daily Motion)

Update: And Jeff Passan launches into to those waging The War on Steroids:

“The same selfishness that pervaded steroid users afflicted those on the opposite side. The anti-doping fiends profited off the drug testing they insisted upon. The moral police used the time-honored canard – the safety of children – to advocate against PED use. The cops and government turned power into score-settling trials.

“It’s no wonder baseball came out so well. Turns out MLB was no worse than the people running the War on Steroids.”

No, this has nothing to do with Ines Sainz, but rather “Ball Four: The Musical,” which has Jim Bouton at work 40 years after the publication of the groundbreaking book.

Please, please keep Andrew Lloyd Webber away from this one. I beg you, Jim. Lest it turn out something like this hideousness:

• As soon as I Tweeted today about Bobby Thomson’s famous homerun, a friend messaged me about one of the famous stories that stemmed from that 1951 playoff game and one of the greatest moments in American sports history. Had I read it?

He was referring to the opening of Don DeLillo’s novel “Underworld.” Initially this chapter, “Pafko at the Wall,” was published in Harper’s magazine and later was released separately as a novella of its own.

Andy Pafko was the Brooklyn Dodgers’ left fielder who looked on helplessly as Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” sailed over his head and beyond his reach.

The Giants won the pennant, and DeLillo’s fictionalized story — featuring true-life characters Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover — populated a tale as rich and resonant as the real thing.

Thomson, who died this week at the age of 86, enjoyed an otherwise uneventful career, but as the Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark points out in “The Story is Never Over,” one moment can be immortal, and can speak for much, much more than the moment itself:

“The Shot has become a story about what constitutes triumph and tragedy in America, about how sports defines our identity, about fame, celebrity, race, scandal, myth and mystery, recounted time and again in nonfiction books, documentaries, investigations, novels and even poetry.”

And this:

“Journalists can draw from this short history this moral: That the big story is never over. The Civil War is still not over. The Depression is not over. Nor the assassination of JFK. Nor the destruction of the World Trade Center. Hang in there — for a long time — on the Gulf oil spill.”

In a media age seemingly surrendered to the idea of the fleeting moment, these enduring truths are wonderfully encouraging to this old history hack.

• I’ve been spending a good part of this month writing offline, and it’s been vital to reconnect with a more immersive, contemplative process that I worried had escaped my attention span.

What’s also been deeply satisfying as the dog days of summer whittle away has been to reread some books, essays and magazine articles on a variety of topics that I had nearly forgotten about. I’ll post more about that soon, but for now the Pafko story is very high on the list of some fabulous rediscoveries.

• At the same time, old media habits do die hard. ESPN baseball writer Tim Kurkjian has given up his nearly 20-year habit of cutting out, and pasting, every single Major League Baseball box score into a notebook. With newspapers almost uniformly resigning box scores to their websites, Kurkjian, a former scribe for the Baltimore Sun, now reads them online as well. Yet he finds that something very important is missing:

“I’m not comfortable doing it but I have no other choice. I have saved time, as well as money on scotch tape and scissors. Since 9/11, I estimate having lost at least six pair of scissors because I forgot to remove them from my bag and the security men and women at airports thought I might hijack the plane using scissors as dull as NFL preseason games.

“But I still read box scores with the same vigor and interest every day for there is so much to learn in box scores, almost everything you need is in box scores, especially with the expanded ones that tell you, in some cases, more than you wanted to know.”