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.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

Ted Williams, circa 1955 

Photograph from Getty

It was 57 years ago today that the great--though enigmatic--Ted Williams took his final swing on a baseball field.  It was only fitting that he would put the finishing touches on his playing resumé in the form of his 521st career home run.

John Updike's brilliant piece, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, chronicled the events of that day, and first appeared in the October 22, 1960 issue of The New Yorker. It is one of the great pieces of long-form sportswriting ever produced.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Read the whole piece here. It's long, but it's worth it.