The Major League Baseball season ended last night. I enjoyed this year as much as any I have for quite a while. The Cubs exceeded expectations and the Royals had a marvelous run to their World Series. My other team, the Oakland A's, had a rotten year and yet remained instructive.
Yet, baseball is over, making it also a bittersweet, sad day...there is no more baseball now until the early spring training games emerge in early March. At this moment each year, I come back to one of the most poignant descriptions of this loss in this piece by the late Commissioner of Baseball, Bart Giamatti. Read the entire piece for the full effect, but its lead paragraph says it all.
Persevere...with or without baseball.
"The Green Fields of the Mind " by Bart Giamatti
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.
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