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Mann recognizes the constant pressure on these players, each game "an extended audition" with long odds. (The Seattle Mariners, he says, have only produced one major leaguer from their farm system in seven years.) He envies the players' single-minded focus and drive as much as their talent. "It's a monastic life, with fidelity to one thing. And so to watch Erasmo play baseball is to watch more perfection, more focused thought, than I will ever achieve in a lifetime of critical thinking," Mann writes.

Readers seeking extended play-by-plays and assessments of skills would do better to look elsewhere. Jim Collins' The Last Best League, about the prestigious Cape Cod summer league of amateur college players — which produces 1 out of every 6 major leaguers (and which I've followed avidly for years) — gives a better picture of scouting, while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's 2008 movie Sugar, about a Dominican pitcher's trials in a single-A minor league team in Iowa, provides a sharper view of what's at stake for Latino players.

Mann offers a different sort of analysis, at once lyrical, intellectual and personal. His meditations on "a game that allows ample time for reflection and appreciation" lift Class A above the fray of more ordinary baseball books. He contrasts the players' undiluted optimism with his own studied, self-protective "nonchalance and irony" and his preoccupation with loss, centering on his older brother's death from drug addiction 10 years earlier. Nicknamed "Mannchild" on his Vassar College team, he's aware of straddling boyhood and manhood, like the players. He writes with self-deprecating honesty about missing bedtime baseball stories read to him by his father, about fear of failure, and about his attempts to impose metaphor and deeper meaning "onto a game and a group of people that want to be taken literally." He adds, "And yes, it is unfair to want Erasmo to feel more. I come to these games for meaning and metaphor, and he comes here for numbers, the right algorithm to move on."

Class A captures the longing, the uncertainty and the drive for recognition, both on and off the ball field.

Read an excerpt of Class A

On the types of schools that are particularly trapped in an economic bind

"Most small, private liberal arts colleges in general. I mean, if you look at a map of the country, most of the private colleges in the U.S. are in the Midwest and the Rust Belt and the Northeast, where all the population growth, especially of 18-year-olds, [is in] the South and Southwest. And so part of the problem is that they're having a hard time just attracting students, because students have to fly halfway across the country to pay $50,000 for a degree that they're not quite sure what they're going to do with."

On what higher education will look like in the future

"I still think that colleges are still going to exist — physical college campuses are still going to exist for those who want it. What will be different, however, is that you're going to have many more players in the system. [For example] if you decide to take a MOOC [Massive Online Open Course] ... and you want to transfer credit ... MOOCs might provide a piece of a person's education.

"This idea of competency-based education, which I think is perhaps the most disruptive force potentially entering higher education — so, right now we measure learning by time spent in a seat. They test you on the way in, they see what you know, and you basically focus on what you don't know. What I think the disruption will be is that some students could finish in 2 1/2 years. There's nothing really magic about 120 credits in four years. It's just tradition."

College Comparison Tool

Jeff Selingo and The Chronicle of Higher Education developed this website to allow students and parents to compare colleges' costs, graduation rates and graduate salaries.

College Reality Check

America's unlikeliest link to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reached out to his friend in a bid to have an American citizen released from one of the communist nation's notorious labor camps.

"I'm calling on the Supreme Leader of North Korea or as I call him 'Kim', to do me a solid and cut Kenneth Bae loose," former basketball star Dennis Rodman tweets.

Bae was last week given a 15-year sentence. According to The Associated Press, he is "a tour operator who was arrested in North Korea in November. The North's Supreme Court sentenced him ... for unspecified 'hostile acts' against the state. In a Foreign Ministry statement on Sunday, North Korea said the 44-year-old Washington state man entered the country with a disguised identity."

Rodman, you may recall, was in North Korea in late February and early March with a production crew for Vice Media. He'll be part of an upcoming documentary series on HBO that explores different cultures around the world. While there, Rodman had some one-on-one time with Kim — and sat with the North Korean leader to watch a basketball game involving some players from the Harlem Globetrotters and North Korean athletes.

"The Worm," as Rodman is known, came back from the trip saying of the young Korean leader that "I love the guy. He's awesome. He's so honest." As for the North's terrible record on human rights, Rodman told ABC's This Week with George Stephanapoulos that:

"I hate the fact that he's doing it, but the fact is, you know what, as a human being, though, he let his guard down. He did it one day to me. I didn't talk about that. I understand that."

The Senate is considering legislation to prevent a global helium shortage from worsening in October. That's when one huge supply of helium in the U.S. is set to terminate. The House overwhelmingly passed its own bill last month to keep the Federal Helium Program going.

That was a relief to industries that can't get along without helium. The gas is used in MRI machines, semiconductors, aerospace equipment, lasers and of course balloons.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the helium shortage is to talk to people like Stacie Lee Banks, who owns a flower shop in Washington, D.C. She is one of the go-to people in the city for filling large orders of party balloons.

Banks says she started noticing a problem about half a year ago. Her supplier used to send her two tanks of helium every time she was running short. Now he only sends one tank — if that. When she called him recently, he said he was completely out.

In a bind like this, Banks would normally pop over to the CVS pharmacy next door to fill up balloons.

"They're saying we can't use any of their helium anymore either," Banks says. "So it's like, I don't know where we're gonna get helium."

There's a global shortage of refined helium, and it could get worse if the federal government doesn't stay in the business of selling helium.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to nearly a century ago to World War I. Germany started building huge inflatable aircraft, and to keep up, the U.S. started stockpiling helium. That federal helium reserve is located outside Amarillo, Texas.

Sam Burton of the Bureau of Land Management helps manage the supply. Burton says "he lives and breathes helium," adding that he's a "total helium geek."

Burton says there are now 10 billion cubic feet of the gas stored in this federal reservoir — enough to fill about 50,000 Goodyear blimps. And it's all kept under a wide-open prairie dotted with coyotes and jack rabbits.

"Imagine a layer cake being several thousand feet thick, layers of rock several thousand feet thick, you'd get an idea of how the gas has been stored in one particular layer," Burton explains.

Over the decades, private companies learned how to extract helium too. But they weren't extracting that much of it, partly because the government was selling helium so cheaply.

Then in 1996, Congress decided it was time to get the federal government out of the helium business so it wouldn't compete with private industry. Congress passed a law that would effectively end the helium program this October. The problem is: Private companies haven't caught up with demand, and a big hole would be left in the market if Washington suddenly cut off supply as scheduled.

Salo Zelermyer is lobbying to keep the government operating the reserve: "Certainly if you take half the domestic supply and a third of the global supply off the market just like that, you're going to get a lot of volatility in the system. You're going to have a lot of end users that aren't going to be able to meet the needs of both taxpayers and regular folks who go in to get MRIs or go out to buy high-end electronics."

So industries are nervous.

Carolyn Durand of Intel Corp., which makes semiconductor chips, says they're already learning to limit their use of the gas.

"Where we've been able to replace helium with another inert gas like argon or nitrogen, we have," Durand says. "Where we've been able to conserve, shut off things instead of keeping continuous flow, we will do that."

If legislation to head off the shortage passes, it would buy private companies time to find reliable domestic sources of helium.