Beautiful Baseball Writing

Via The Plank, excerpts from late MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti's "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. Today ... a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

...

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion. I am not that grown up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.  

Some people can't stand the poetic waxings of the David Halberstams, the Roger Angells, and the like about the national pastime.  I'm not one of those people.  Even George Will is sometimes palatable when he's writing about baseball.  Sometimes.  But the fact that baseball has inspired so many like-minded paeans over the years reinforces its place in the national psyche.   

God save Alexander Cartwright.