I love baseball. There is no place I’d rather be than sitting three rows up from the field on the third base side, feeling the warmth of the sun sink into my bones, sipping a Labatts Blue, watching the boys of summer play. There’s a rhythm to it, activity in its leisure, that is as exciting as it is relaxing. Watching the manager sending signs, looking for the hit and run, and occasionally witnessing the two most exciting things on the planet - the suicide squeeze and the in-the-park homerun - it’s a wonderful way to pass a Sunday afternoon.
I always want the season to last forever. This is Buffalo, New York, after all, and fall is coming, and on its heels is snow. It is only 67 degrees here now, and I have goosebumps from the chill.
But no, I can’t think about that now. Not with the smell of Coppertone fresh in my nostrils and the memory of a 7 to 6 win fresh in my mind. Yet I’m not the first to want the game to last forever.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball who banned Pete Rose from the game, wrote an essay entitled, “The Green Fields of the Mind”. I read with a heavy sigh...
“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.” [link]
Could we write this poetically about football? I think not.
I just love this game.
(Above photograph of Miguel Ian playing t-ball, copyright 2006 by Michael Tabor)
