George Weigel pens a love letter to baseball:
I’ve never met a serious baseball fan whose love for the game isn’t specific rather than generic: one becomes passionate about a team; love of the game itself follows from that. Which is why, I suppose, otherwise sane people remain fans of the Chicago Cubs, or still mourn St. Louis’s loss of the Browns (who became my Orioles in 1954). That specific loyalty is a “shield and buckler” (Psalm 91: 4) against the ebbs and flows of baseball fortune. And those highs and lows themselves reflect the game’s deeper truths, never better expressed than by the late Bart Giamatti, who was president of both Yale and the National League and rightly thought the latter the higher distinction:
It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and it 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 you need it most, it goes . . . and summer (is) gone.
The Dish 