end of the [Red Sox] baseball season

Sherlock and I are both Red Sox fans.  Stomach punch end to the season this weekend.  I always feel sad for a while after it ends, in part because baseball is a game that gives our life a pace – for a few weeks I don’t quite know what to do with myself without the rituals of checking box scores in the morning and listening to the WEEI radio call of games in the evening. And I miss baseball too because, more than other sports, baseball asks fundamental questions (about faith, hope, dreams, despair, the call of home, etc).  Another for instance, the statistic fetish in baseball is illustrative of something very basic to the human condition: a desire to apprehend patterns and order in a world that is often marked more by drama than predictability.

No one has offered a better reflection on the end of the baseball season that the late A. Bartlett Giamatti:

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

Author: Kleiner

Associate Vice Provost and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. I teach across the curriculum, but am most interested in continental philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy as well as Catholic thought, all of which might be summed up as an interest in the ressourcement tradition (returning in order to make progress). I also enjoy spending time thinking about liberal education and its ends. View all posts by Kleiner