Just say "steroids."

Ask some people for the time and they will give you the history of clocks.

Jeff Passan has been saving up some good stuff, just waiting for somebody to ask him what he thinks about the current state of baseball:

"The game is right. The game will always be right. The game is why baseball now thrives, why it has persevered, why it caught on in the first place. The game is malleable enough -- fast or slow, intense or laid-back, a pitching duel or slugfest -- to sate the vox populi. The game speaks. The game cries. The game invites. The game, simply, is perfect.

Baseball is a dream that can be fulfilled, or at least seems that way, and that gives it a proletariat edge that no other sport can claim. Basketball discriminates by height, football by girth or speed, hockey by coordination or number of teeth missing. Fat or skinny, fast or slow, tall or short, baseball is accessible -- full of choices, indeed, from the game itself to the players to the ways in which one can enjoy it."

I think you had your Pulitzer, until the whole "sate the vox populi" thing.

First of all, vox populi should be in italics. Small matter, but the Committee is keen on details.

More importantly, that's not a proper use of vox populi.

Using the literal translation -- "voice of the people" -- this doesn't make sense.

Baseball sates the voice of the people? Why doesn't baseball just sate the people? "Baseball sates the populi." Or perhaps baseball sates the appetites of the people?

More commonly, vox populi is translated as "public sentiment" or "public opinion." Which means pretty much the same thing and makes just as little sense in Passan's usage.

I know what Passan is trying to say. Baseball sates the general public, the unwashed masses, the doting Johnny Lunchpails.

In other words, "People Like Baseball."

That was easy and written entirely in English, without any Latin.