"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, blossoms in the summer, and fades away in October."

-- Bart Giamatti,

"The Green Fields of the Mind" (1977)

Baseball has always been my favorite sport, though I sometimes have trouble explaining why. It goes back to childhood--to summers spent with a scuffed Rawlings glove and a sandlot brewing by late morning. I played more baseball than anything else as a kid. And I felt better equipped for baseball than for football or basketball. In the '60s and '70s, players on the field looked like ordinary American men, not sculpted out of marble or looming like redwoods. Baseball, at least then, felt accessible--something a wiry kid with quick hands and decent instincts could aspire to.

I followed the game fanatically from the time I was 6 years old--the glory years of the Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers--and kept that devotion burning well into the early 1990s. I can still rattle off the starting lineups of most teams between 1967 and 1978 as if they were the cast of some beloved vanished play. In the '70s, I even played a season of what might generously be called professional baseball in Brazil, a half-forgotten adventure that lives on in fading box scores and warm memories. (I somehow lost my old jersey, a garish yellow-and-black double-knit, a few years ago. I probably donated it to charity in one of my periodic purges.)

There's a minor-league ballpark not........

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