MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
The Major League Baseball postseason is upon us, beginning Tuesday. The regular season, with help from a nor’easter and two open postseason spots, did not go quietly into the night. But, sadly, as they all do, it did go.
Sigh … for no matter how well, so-so or badly things go for a particular team, a melancholy surrounds us when the 162-game MLB season comes to a close.
The baseball fan, you see, whether his or her favorite team is in the playoffs or not, is never ready for the day-to-day of baseball to be over, because, to us, baseball is forever.
We never want the season to end because even bad baseball is better than no baseball.
Sadly, it won’t be long from now, when the postseason is complete and November comes, the nights will be barren, carrying with them the grim reality of the saddest words ever – No game today.
The stability of knowing there is a game every day and every night and being able to count on it, then adjusting your entire day and night around the first pitch provides great comfort, whether you are attending the game, watching it on TV or listening to it on the radio.
As Baseball Hall of Fame writer Thomas Boswell said in Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary, “(Baseball is) one of those forms of gentle poetry that runs through our lives and makes the more important issues of living bearable. You have to have moments that give you pleasure with your children or your hobbies or your games. Life can’t all be big issues and heart surgery. Something has to bring joy into the day.”
A friend of mine, while overcoming health issues two years ago when the Orioles were entering the playoffs, said, “I’m very excited about the postseason but also very sad about the regular season ending … Baseball has always been my happy place, and that’s been even more true since my diagnosis. I love regular-season baseball. It’s like a friend who’s always there for you.”
Boswell said, “I’ve always thought that the six months during the baseball season there was something in the day that wasn’t there the other six months in winter. It was not that you had to listen to the game, but that you could if you needed it.”
A lot of us need it.
As Earl Weaver once told Boswell himself in the dugout just prior to the first pitch, “This ain’t football, kid. We do this every day.”
A lot of us need it every day.
That’s because baseball is every day. Baseball is something new every day. Baseball is something new every game. You see things that continue to provide you with wonder and goose bumps, no matter how long you’ve been a baseball fan and no matter how late into a lost season that moment may occur.
As the baseball season approaches, you’re filled with great anticipation. Then it arrives and lives up to and often exceeds your expectations, and in the wink of a young girl’s eye, it’s over, and you miss it immediately.
As soon as it’s over, you miss it – the day-to-day of baseball.
It’s the companionship. It’s the companionship of those and what you are familiar with and what you love that you never look forward to missing. It’s the familiar voices. It’s the company that lives in the heart of all that defines who and what we are.
In “The Green Fields of the Mind,” A. Bartlett Giamatti 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.”
The chill rains have come, but we’ll keep watching for as long as we can, because, really, what else better is there to do? And with the impending owners lockout, we had better relish every pitch of every postseason game we’ll have.
As Art Hill wrote, “With those who don’t give a damn about baseball, I can only sympathize. I do not resent them. I am even willing to concede that many of them are physically clean, good to their mothers and in favor of world peace. But while the game is on, I can’t think of anything to say to them.”
Good night, 162.
Rest easy. Thank you for our summer afternoons and evenings.
See you in the spring.
We hope.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began. covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at mikeburke934@gmail.com. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT