Stephen Mejias

When I was younger, I wanted to grow up to become a Major League baseball player. Baseball runs in my family. My grandfather played in the sugarcane fields, my father played in the street, my uncles played Little League. Each generation, it seemed, got better and closer. I had one uncle who made it all the way to a Major League farm club before injuring his knee.

"Stevie's gonna make it," he'd say. "Stevie's got what it takes."

The happiest day of my eleven-year-old life came when I made a diving catch to win the Ironbound Little League championship. The rest of the team carried me off the field, chanting "MVP!" I was a star at school, too. I was known around little leagues and elementary schools all over Newark, NJ. "Good catch," strangers would say.

I was thinking of this as I walked down our fluorescent hall, after receiving an e-mail from Nerissa, our managing editor on the Buyer's Guide.

"In the Meridian Reference 808 listing, under 'Special Features,' the text should read 'Card-Based.' Not 'Crad-Based,'" I'd told her.

I'd even gone to the Meridian site beforehand to make sure that there wasn't such a thing as "Crad-Based Technology." You never know with these things. I found:

To ensure the finest sound, the 808's construction employs a motherboard and multiple cards. Each card has its own power supplies and buffering so that each section — computer, decoder, FIFO buffers, DSP upsampling, D/A conversion, digital output, analogue input and digital input — is on a separate and isolated card.

That settled it. The Meridian 808 was definitely card-based. Not crad-based.

"Good catch," Nerissa responded.

It's just something editors say. It's nothing much acknowledging nothing much. There would have been no great loss had "crad" stayed in the book. It was just a matter of switching around a couple of letters to make something a little more right. Nobody's getting carried off the field. But it certainly makes me feel fine.