“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 all 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.”
A. Bartlett Giamatti
Despite the stink of steroids over all
professional sports, my desperate love for baseball,
it goes on. Goes on even with the Cardinals finished.
I still watch the games, I love the names. Prince Fielder,
Angel Pagan, Buster Posey, Hunter Pence–
a jump rope chant, a spell for a long October.
A. Bartlett Giamatti’s right. Forlorn
for summer just exactly when we need
it most. I miss the hundred sliding beads
of sweat, all racing down the gin & tonic glass.
Let me confess another sin. “Best ass
in the National League,” a friend said of Tommy Herr.
That’s why I started watching in 1982.
The game blessed my lust. My love. Continues to.
marniere 
Mr. Giamatti had it right on the money! Since neither The Atlanta Braves, nor The St. Louis Cardinals made it to The World Series, I could care less about the outcome. There is always next year and hope springs eternal with the promise of spring training within a few months…I miss Tony LaRussa, my two year old Chinese Pug’s namesake…