MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
Enjoy the Helene-delayed doubleheader between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves today, because once it’s over, another baseball regular season will be over.
The playoffs begin on Tuesday, and for the better part of the next month the postseason will provide us with far different theater. And though there will be excitement around here surrounding the recent resurgence of the Baltimore Orioles returning to the playoffs for the second year in a row, a melancholy still surrounds many of us when the 162-game 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, yet for those of us who are blessed with the gift of baseball love, baseball never ends. Baseball is forever.
We never want the season to end because even bad baseball is better than no baseball, and when the postseason is complete and November comes, the nights will be suddenly barren, carrying with them the grim reality of the saddest words on earth – No game today.
The stability of knowing there is a game every day and every night and being able to count on it, then, consciously or subconsciously, 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 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.”
An acquaintance from X, an Orioles fan who is in the process of overcoming health issues, posted on Sunday, “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.”
As Boswell went on to say, “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.”
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.”
And some of us need it every day.
That’s because baseball is every day. Baseball is something new every day. During every baseball game you watch you see something happen that you have never seen before. You see things that continue to provide you with great 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.
The baseball season, you see, is not unlike the experience of a high school class reunion. As it approaches, you are 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 once the so longs and the we’ll stay in touches have been said and the final tastes are savored, you miss it.
Almost as soon as it’s over, you miss it – your class reunion, your classmates and the people and things you hold dear to your heart. And that’s how it is with the day-to-day of the baseball season.
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 Orioles, of course, will continue to play, but for the Washington Nationals, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and for baseball fans everywhere, the chill rains have just begun.
So, good night, regular-season baseball. Rest easy. Thank you for our summer afternoons and evenings.
Thank you for being here for us around the clock.
We’ll miss you.
See you in the spring.
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 [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT