I don't believe what I just saw!

28 years ago today... 

Designed to Break Your Heart, part 2

Those of us who are baseball romantics are, in a sense, like Peter Pan, forever children.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game—not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

From The Green Fields of the Mind, originally included in the November, 1977 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal, and later included in the 1998 book, A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti.

Designed to Break Your Heart, part 1

Words written 39 years ago today, and yet, just as timely as ever.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

From The Green Fields of the Mind, originally included in the November, 1977 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal, and later included in the 1998 book, A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti.