11.   Five years ago, he was having his shoulder surgically repaired and baseball seemed an unlikely career choice for Orel Hershiser.

12.   How different it was a decade ago, when major-league baseball in Florida seemed so promising.

13.   If I was punishing baseball, baseball seemed to be withstanding the punishment rather well.

14.   It makes a real baseball seem lighter and smaller.

15.   Jim Eisenreich, a reserve outfielder for Florida, agreed with Flanagan that baseballs do not seem to travel as far in the cold.

16.   Somewhere between The Spit and The Scoop, major league baseball seems to have finally let go of whatever moral grip it still had on itself.

17.   That leaves about three weeks to find a way to make baseball seem important to them, at least for three hours a day.

18.   The aim is to speed up the proceedings, but baseball seems constitutionally resistant to such forces, its tempo immutable.

19.   Whenever Strawberry discussed his cancer, baseball seemed like a far-away notion.

20.   With a new contract, baseball seemed to be emerging from one of its ugliest periods.