Baseball season is over, and that fact alone makes me somewhat wistful.

When the baseball season ends, I am always reminded of my old friend, Bart Giamatti who was a frequent visitor to my “Up Close” show.

Besides being President of the National League, and later Commissioner of baseball, Bart was a poet.

I think my favorite poem of his fits my mood exactly the day after the baseball season ended.

Bart wrote:

“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 most, it stops.

Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time.

Maybe it wasn’t this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast.

There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it.

Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy.

I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.

I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio–not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television–and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind.”