A. Bartlett Giamatti, on baseball:

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.

This is how Bart Giamatti opened his classic baseball essay, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” first published in the November 1977 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal. It's a beautifully written piece that I was reminded of today during the Giants pregame show.

The Giants have had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad season. Going into tonight’s game, they sit on 62 losses, one seemingly elusive win away from avoiding the mortifying humiliation of a 100-loss season, an outcome which has occurred just once in the franchise’s 144-year history, in 1985.

Tonight’s game against the San Diego Padres is being broadcast nationally as part of Apple’s Friday Night Baseball, and one of only four games being broadcast in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro. That’s where I’ll be watching the game. I hope they win. I worry they’ll embarrass themselves.

Because baseball is designed to break your heart.