This verdict comes after a long year of preliminary skirmishing. Now the battle among nine candidates moves into a critical phase with the start of the new year and with a rush of contests that Democrats say is likely to produce a nominee by mid-March.

Hear it? That sportsy politics sound. Then there's this, which seeks to establish who's to blame for "race turns negative." It makes double use of the composite figure:

Dr. Dean's complaints notwithstanding, many Democrats said it had been his campaign — the hard-hitting outsider mocking the Washington Democratic establishment candidates to approving cheers — that set the tone. Those attacks have rankled his opponents, and raised, or lowered, the bar on campaign discourse, several Democrats said.

The first time I recall hearing the phrase "inside baseball" the context was major league baseball. The originator of the term, so far as I know, is the author and great abstracter, Bill James. I was a Mets fan reading him in the 1980s when he began to attract attention for his analysis of players and teams in The Bill James Baseball Abstract.

James was originally a press critic. He came to his ideas via philosophical conflict with the sportswriters' tribe. He thought baseball journalists had a firm grasp on the wrong end of the telescope. They were looking at their subject in a way that shrank it to insignificance, compared to the big picture James saw by tinkering with different measures over longer arcs of time. Thus, he spoke of inside baseball but also "outside baseball," taking the longer view, which was his approach. Today he makes a good living with his knowledge, and works as a consultant for the Red Sox.

The sportswriters who covered major league baseball (as well as executives who ran it, James said) were clueless about certain patterns in the game. Journalists had far too much confidence in a way of knowing James decided to call "inside baseball." It was both an unquestioned practice and a semi-conscious belief among sports reporters.

The practice was to head into the locker room after the Yankees defeat the White Sox for interviews with players and coaches about all manner of "inside" stuff. Like how George Steinbrenner's latest rant about his team was affecting the players under his microscope. What pitch was thrown to Derek Jeter, who got the big hit.

This may be knowledge only three people--pitcher, catcher, hitter--have. In soliciting it during post-game interviews, reporters say they are taking us inside the event, closer to its reality. The missing knowledge, they believe, is in the locker room, the dugout, the team bus, the psychology of the players and the relations among them. These are all "restricted" areas that reporters pry into for us. Thus we too can be inside, with the team, by virtue of what sociologist Erving Goffman called "backstage knowledge."