Major League Baseball

"It's invisible," says Rob Murphy. "And sometimes it moves. Sometimes it's an oval; sometimes an oblong with no corners." On one level, then, there's nothing there at all. Yet those, for many years, were the parameters of his working life. As a relief pitcher for eight MLB teams between 1985 and 1995, all his focus was on that void behind the batter, and the elusive margins between strike and ball. Little wonder, then, if another great passion of Murphy's life is all about giving definition to something most of us...

Since the advent of the simulcasting era 30 years ago, I've never understood why some enterprising track somewhere hasn't seized a late-morning first-post slot and carved out its own niche at a time of day when no other pari-mutuel competition on the continent is running. Be it midweek in the winter, when most of the fair-to-middling Eastern time zone tracks do little to distinguish their products, or as a Saturday special during the summer when some C-level track could have an uncontested advantage for several hours as a lead-in to...