It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game beginsin the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in thesummer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chillrains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count onit, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshineand high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, whenyou need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and brokenbranches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summerwas gone...
-A. Bartlett Giamatti, the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball
