Bart Giamatti said those words, didn't he?

I remember the empty feeling I used to get as a kid when, after the World Series ended, the realization set in that there would be no more baseball till what seemed like forever.

I still feel that way!

Scott

It breaks your heart
 

"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. . . . 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."

--from "The Green Fields of the Mind," by A. Bartlett Giamatti

swollen heart (thinks he's freakin' Faulkner or something)
 

If you no longer get that heartswollen, anything's-possible-this-year-maybe-even-for-the-Cubs-and-Bosox feeling when you first step on the green fields in spring, then you've gotten too jaded to enjoy the game properly and should hang it up and just watch NASCAR the rest of your life.

If you're a blue and you don't confidently, even almost arrogantly, take the field for the first game of the year with the thought that you ought to have W.G.U. on your cap (because that's what you are), then you are on the downhill side of your calling career. Oh sure, within an inning or two you're going to have maybe fluffed a call, or at least not handled one like you know you ought to have, and you'll be just another dusty struggling umpire again; but for that little shining moment, game 1 inning 1, you're ten feet tall and bulletproof and at the helm of the greatest game in the world.

Love this game enough to study the rules in advance, dress right, and get there early. Do the little humbling groundskeeping things make things a little bit safer for the players. Knuckledraggers though you might think some of them are, the players are decent citizens inside (even if maybe WAY deep down inside) and they'll notice what you do and give you credit in their hearts (though they'd probably rather die than say it out loud). Their work lives teach them to respect sincere effort. Offer it, they'll recognize it. Your entire season of servitude might earn you the benefit of the doubt on one (1) close call, too. Ample reward.

I really enjoy working for the drunken churchmen; the Pete Rose wannabes; the arrogant former minor league baseball players now tearing up class D despite a bum right knee; the silly co-ed in terribly inappropriate shoes (and maybe even a skirt) drafted from the stands to be the team's fourth woman; the pastor playing on his church's team and slowly losing his religion; the 300-pound player-manager whose team of equally heavy hitters has never had a season higher than third but who strategizes and agonizes over every game as if it were the Series finale; the coasting class B squad in their hideous yellow-jacket pants who eat up class D opposition all season until by August they've forgotten how to win against their equals; and, God help me, even that breed I find easiest to criticize -- the tournament-addicted softball weekend workaholic who has all the equipment and none of the fun, working too hard at playing to enjoy the game, with his high-school heart in his 36-year-old body, caressing that $400 bat more tenderly than he ever has his tuned-out wife, who is sitting with the other widows in the lawn chairs on the shady side, the game as far away as Mars for her as she watches their children grow up playing in parking lot gravel.

My 11th year. I'm such a rookie; I have so much to learn. Bring it on!