Bartlett Giamatti, in his book Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games, wrote…

“Baseball 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 all 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.”

Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball (and someone whose baseball card I once owned), is also the late father of actor Paul Giamatti, who starred in one of my all-time favorite movies, Sideways.