All I needed to know about life, I learned from old baseball cards.

Like every other American youth, I collected baseball cards as a kid. While most kids were (before 1986) trying to trade all their extra Champ Summers or Von Hayes cards for just one Jim Rice, or (post-1986) immediately sealing all their Bo Jackson cards in Mylar plastic, I took a different approach.

Not content to skim the surface of these cards for information like, "Teddy had 4 RBI in a game for Poughkeepsie in 1985" or "Lenny enjoys surfing in the offseason", I felt there was a deeper wisdom contained in these tiny squares of cardboard.

One might even say that baseball cards contain the mystic wisdom of the universe.

(Of course, this is a free country - one can say almost anything.)

But how do you ferret out the nuggets of wisdom from the banal stats and irrelevant height/weight numbers? Hopefully, this tutorial will help.

Begin the lesson.