A Great and Glorious Game

Opening day has arrived! Well, sort of. MLB has spread the opening festivities over 2 days. And since I'm a die-hard Chicago White Sox follower, and the Sox play their first game tomorrow, I'm going to count tomorrow as my official Opening Day!

I can guarantee you I'll be streaming at least part of the game versus Cleveland tomorrow afternoon. Work may preclude me watching the entire thing, but there will definitely be some "first pitch action" at my desk!

By the way, the title of today's post comes from a wonderful little book featuring the baseball writings of the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, a gentleman, a scholar, and the last true Commissioner of baseball. (If you follow the game, you know what I'm talking about...)

It includes one of my all-time favorite essays about the game, The Green Fields of the Mind, which begins like this:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in th espring, 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.

Absolute poetry.  Read it sometime. You can Google it to find the whole text. Meantime, play ball!