Of Green Fields and Summer’s End
Forty-four years ago, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a philosopher of the game, Professor of English Renaissance Literature, later to be President of Yale College, President of the National League of Base Ball Clubs, and then Commissioner of Baseball for five all-too-brief months, put fingers to keys and crafted these words:
"The Green Fields of the Mind "
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.
On a rather warmer October 3, a Sunday of bright sky and sunshine and wind and dry pavement, baseball stopped once more, as it has done for a hundred and fifty-two years, and summer again was gone.
The Minnesota Twins’ season was long-ago lost. The only hope for this team in that Game 162 was the distant but concrete hope that a hundred and thirty-five days hence, the magical words “Pitchers and Catchers Report” would arrive on the calendar, and hope for another summer of brightness and magic would begin. This team was playing to avoid the singular dishonor of finishing with ninety or more losses in a 162-game season. Four months prior, the rest of the league had figured out the weak pitching that belied the team’s 9-2 start and drove the Twins to two nearly-consecutive double-digit losing streaks that made threepeating as division champions all but a distant fantasy; an inopportune losing streak in late June when the team seemed on the verge of breaking through to the positive side of the win column made it certain that two of its brightest stars would disappear in trades to other teams. In return for Nelson Cruz and Jose Berrios, the Twins gained four excellent young players and hope for years to come in Joe Ryan, Drew Strotman, Simeon Woods-Richardson, and Austin Martin.
Two weeks prior to October 3, the possibility of a break-even season had slipped beyond the bounds of mathematics as that team lost its eighty-second game of the season.
But in the beginning of this game, this Game 162, the Twins were in fine form. Matching hits by Luis Arraez and Byron Buxton had put two men on for Jorge Polanco, who promptly cleared the bases with a prodigious clout. Four batters later, the Twins had all the runs they would need this day. The Royals would put three on the board in a brief flash of life in the third inning, only to be subdued by a timely pitching substitution, and held scoreless for the rest of the day. 7 to 3. In a better 2021, that might have been this Twins team’s final warmup before the postseason. But in this dreary and plagued version of the year, it was simply a brief flash of a year that could have been amid the year that was lost. For nine more innings, we were permitted the illusion that summer could last forever.
In this 2021, we could only imagine what might have been.
