“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…”

Here I am again, reciting the words of A. Bartlett Giamatti’s timeless “Green Fields of the Mind” in mid October. I hate those words, I really do, but they always seem to be so appropriate for the fans of 29 teams, and especially for Dodger fans, who now have 27 years without the brass ring. Fact is, I think it’s worse for us because of the teams recent successes that tease us, the clubs high payroll and the unceasing prognostications that constantly favor our beloved blue to win the whole thing.

“…You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive…”

Just a few weeks ago, our Dodgers went off and spun 13 wins in 15 games in the September stretch run, distancing themselves from the hapless Giants and expanding their division lead from 1.5 to 8.5 games. There was that ray of hope. That feeling that everything was happening as it should.

Corey Seager was excelling in his first few weeks in the show, Justin Ruggiano had arrived and provided clutch hit after another. A.J. Ellis was contributing again just after many of us had given up on him. Hopes were vibrant. 2015 appeared to be the year.

Everything was happening as it should.
(Photo credit – Jon SooHoo)

Home field advantage in the first round was attained. Clayton got his 300 Ks. Zack his ERA title. The starting rotation was set up as planned. We knew it would be a tough run, but things were falling into place.

“…and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops…”

This Dodger club had a lot of holes in it, but how many championship teams have overcome them by getting hot at the right time? A lot us us held out hope that the Dodgers would catch lightning in a bottle and run with it.

Justin Turner did. The man was about as hot as could be, reeking of confidence and grit. Clayton Kershaw did in game four. Determined to slay the demons of Octobers past, he succeeded in doing so. There were glimmers of hope and game five started with an exciting offensive explosion…and then, well what can be said? Disappointment. Lost opportunities. A call or two not going our way. Mental lapses. And finally, failure to come through in the clutch.

Familia threw, Kendrick swung, and it was over.
(Photo credit – Lenny Ignelzi)

“…Today…a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”

I can relate to those words now more than ever that I’m temporarily located on the east coast where the weather turns on a dime. When the game concluded with a mighty wimper and a Jeurys Familia fastball on Thursday night, it was 11:30 PM EST. I needed to be up by 4:30 AM for work but how in the world was I going to sleep?

I took out my frustrations on the pavement and went out for a midnight run. The autumn cold punched me in the gut as I went outside. The chilling wind cut my face with a penetrable slap. The leaves were falling on the lighted jogging trail I trotted upon and it just reminded me more and more of the closure of baseball for the year. The dreary winter coming ahead, and five months before opening day.

I’ll be 55 years old next season, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever experience the euphoria of a Dodger championship again. Falling leaves and a chilled air following a bitter defeat will play those mind games on you. It’s life smacking in the face. It’s sports fandom. You wonder if it’s all worth it. Why do I take this freaking sport…a silly game…so seriously?

Worst of all is realizing that there are four teams out there still playing baseball, and we all know ours should be one of them. It should be us trying to break the hearts of Cubs fans for the 107th consecutive year. It should be us looking on StubHub and seeing how much World Series tickets in Kansas City or Toronto would cost. We should be lining up our starting rotation in our minds instead of perusing the websites to see if Don Mattingly has been fired yet.

When the season ends on a losing note, it sucks. I know that’s not the most eloquent way to say it, but sometimes just saying that something “sucks” is the most descriptive way of putting things. So I’ll escape from my juvenile prose and return to Giamatti’s masterpiece, with a few replacement words to make it completely appropriate to Dodger faithful…

“Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn’t this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.

I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio–not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television–and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.

It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit, hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much gritty, grainy, contrary reality.

The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide… (Familia) threw, (Kendrick) swung, and it was over. Summer died in (Southern California) and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of (Dodger Stadium), quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because (Los Angeles) lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the (Mets) of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised…”

Have a safe and blessed off-season everyone. There’s approximately 3 months and three weeks until pitchers and catchers report to Camelback Ranch. There’s always hope that next year will be the year.