Baseball: A Game Designed to Break Your Heart

When collecting baseball cards, I was always delighted to find a card that didn't feature a single player, but something else, like a team photo or a triple threat of sluggers or a mascot or a coach or perhaps a retrospective featuring an old timer.

So it was cool to find this baseball card of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball, a president of Yale University and a professor of English Renaissance literature. Quite the credentials.

He wrote this beautiful passage of the sport:

"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 the most, it stops . . . and summer is gone."