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.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," in a book of his essays about baseball.
If the game of baseball at the professional level were rigged so we know, at least the insiders know, in advance who wins, and always will win, for the next 100 years or more, whoever rigged it would be worth his weight in gold. Some who are trying to keep the richest richest and most virtuous and wisest forever (the role of family governance work), I bet some went to Yale, some to Harvard, some to Princeton, some to other fine places; others have a better excuse. I wish they all had had Giamatti. He looked like a Machiavellian Prince, with a prematurely grey goatee, dark eyes, and a limp that seemed like a divine curse, to compensate for his eloquence. He spoke of wealth as "mucky pelf." Each of us was called upon not by name, but by Noble. "And now we will hear from Noble Cubeta...." In my first paper I misspelled, on the title page, the name of the author (Edmund Spenser). The name of the book to which the course and Giamatti's career were devoted (The Fairie Queene). And my own last name. He circled all these in red and gave me an A minus. I was, you may assume an heir. But no. It was his form, I suppose, of Affirmative Action.
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