You go into a baseball stadium with a certain childlike anticipation, and
you should leave it with a certain mature wisdom. We go to baseball games
for the same reason the Greeks went to tragedies. Baseball offers something
of the same catharsis, the same sense of elevation after a game well played.
The feeling was palpable at this final game at the 74-year-old ballpark.
The 8,307 paid customers -- the third-largest crowd in Ray Winder's history
-- were outnumbered by all the ghosts, all the memories of games played
here, all the Texas League championships won and mainly lost here.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, baseball commissioner and philosopher but mainly fan,
readily understood the game's sense of tragedy, being a Red Sox fan.
To quote his little book on the subject: "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, you 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."
But win or lose, we never stop loving the game. We love it as we love
something better than ourselves. We love it because it is whole as we want
to be whole, as we want our country to be whole. As with love, there is no
rational explanation, not a complete one, anyway, for why we love this game,
this essentially pastoral pursuit in a now urban America, this most
intellectual of physical sports.
In the end, baseball's appeal must be felt, not demonstrated by some pallid
Euclidian proof, and if you can't feel it, then there's something missing,
and not in the game.