Tomorrow is opening day for the MLB. Here is my tribute to the sport I love best and part of an essay from Bart Giamatti’s, A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. This essay makes me weep!
“The Green Fields of the Mind”
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. . .
. . . Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing
more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps
time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns,
three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse,
to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the
day and to organize the daylight. . .
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