Almost here

We are almost there.  The 2010 baseball season begins in less than one week.  As always, my hopes are up for the Giants, who have a much younger team going into this year, and with continued strong pitching.  They reached a deal with Tim Lincecum to avoid arbitration, they just extended Matt Cain's contract, and Barry Zito has to return to form some time.


When the baseball season arrives, I am always reminded of Bart Giamatti's great piece, "The Green Fields of the Mind."  It begins like this:

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.

Well, this is the beginning, so we can wait a while for October.