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Baseball elegy
of the day
"Summer died in New
England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway,
quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining
of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope
to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our
best invention to stay change, to bring change on. That is why it
breaks my heart, that game - not because in New York they could win because
Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees
of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of
human beings over another. 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."
A. Bartlett Giamatti,
after Jim Rice flied out to center, allowing the Yankees to clinch
the American League East in 1977
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