"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."

That particular gem of prose came from the pen of A. Bartlett Giamatti. He was a professor of Renaissance literature, President of Yale, President of the National League, and when he died, the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Mpre importantly, he was a life-long Red Sox fan. And as such, he understood clearly how baseball wiggles it's way into the fabric of your life for a chunk of each year, only to rip itself from that fabric in way that for Red Sox fans is usually brutal and heartbreaking.

As I write this, the football pre-season is drawing to a close. Over the past few weeks talk of the Patriots has filled workplaces, bars, homes and Dunkin Donuts. Listening to these conversations I noticed some things so obvious that I wondered why it had never occurred to me before.

Football players are invariably referred to by their last names, as in 'Brady looks good so far' or 'Bledsoe was a class act' or 'I like Belichick's syle.' If you approached a stranger on the street or anywhere else and said 'So, do you think Tom can do it again this year?' you'd probably get a funny look. Yet we refer to the Red Sox players in a much more easy and intimate manner - by their first names. Pedro. Nomar (Nomah!). Manny. Grady. Almost as if we know them, although we certainly don't.

I think this difference is due to the way in which the respective sports intrude into our lives. Football arrives once a week with a crash and a bang and lots of fanfare, with rock n' roll theme songs for commercials and exploding teen popstars at half time. A football game is an event, a happening, a rite, that engulfs you for a few hours each week and then recedes until the next go around.

Baseball compels your attention in a more subtle manner. Earl Weaver once said "This ain't a football game, we do this every day" and that pretty much sums it up. Sixteen regular season games as opposed to one hundred sixty two. You simply can't get as riled and fired up for each and every baseball game the way you can for football - if you 'do' baseball, you do it every day, not once a week. You may miss a game but baseball is always there in the background, creeping into your life as you check the scores over coffee or scan the dial for the latest news as you come home late at night. When that presence in the background stops, as it does each year, it leaves a strangely empty void. If football is weekly gladiatoral contest with chess-like overtones, then baseball is a war, a long, drawn-out campaign of attrition. When you threw in long-standing rivalries, like the Yankees-Red Sox, it becomes less a war and more a blood fued, with ancient grievances relished and new ones inflicted.

Now we're fast approaching that time of year when the game will abruptly vanish from the background, when we'll have to stop doing baseball for a cold winter. Right now, the Red Sox are 4.5 games back of the Yankees in the Division race and a half game up on Seattle in the Wildcard race. The Yanks are in town for their final stand at Fenway, and the Red Sox will get their final licks in against them in the Bronx next week. Right now there is still hope that another year of doing baseball will finally pay off for the Red Sox Nation. Maybe..just maybe...this is the year.

"Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. . . . 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."
-from The Green Fields of the Mind by Bart Giamatti

N.B. - just to get whet your appetite for this weekend's action, here's some Red Sox links:

David Halberstam reports on the State of the Nation.

John Updike's classic essay on Ted Williams' last game (and the only bit of his writing I've ever been able to somach.)

A scathing bit on the Boston sports media that informs and infuriates.