With baseball breaking out from a long winter at all levels across the country, this classic treatise deserves a fresh read:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~rmatz/giamatti.html
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Beautiful. THANK you, igball.
This really is beautiful, glorious writing.
This, too, is why I love baseball. It is, as Bart's son Marcus said (partially quoting his father), "the last pure place where Americans dream. This is the last great arena, the last green arena, where everybody can learn lessons of life."
quote:
"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.
"...It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
"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, or without even the hope of 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."
This, too, is why I love baseball. It is, as Bart's son Marcus said (partially quoting his father), "the last pure place where Americans dream. This is the last great arena, the last green arena, where everybody can learn lessons of life."
Thanks for sharing
Can someone direct me to more writings like this? I grew up "watching" a few baseball games and not paying much attention to sports in general, but it wasn't until my son bagan playing 8 years ago that I really began seeing the depth to the game of baseball. Stealing second is an art form in itself! Who knew? Not me. The more I sit in on my sons practices the more amazed I am. Funny, I got him hooked on baseball simply because I knew slightly more about it than s****r, and it seemed less rough than football, and in reality he got me hooked.