Holy Cow, It's Over

It is, for me, sort of like Sunday and Monday must have been for St. Louisans. On Sunday, the joy of a Championship Parade and Rally that drew far more people than could ever hope to fit into Busch III, and on Monday it was announced that they live in the Most Dangerous City in America (Woo-Hoo, we Memphians dropped to 13th!). Friday was A World Series Winner, Saturday was all the reporting on same, Sunday was the celebration. Monday? Cataract surgery for my wife. (She's viewing the world significantly better, by the way) No baseball.
The two best things I've ever seen about the off-season? 1) Rogers Hornsby, when asked what he did in the winter, when there is no baseball, responded, "I look out the window and wait for spring." Amen. 2) The next to last legitimate Commissioner of Baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, at his literary height wrote: "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, it stops." The essay is "The Green Fields of the Mind" and is available in several places. I encourage anyone feeling grief today to hunt it up, and keep it close at hand this winter. It will help.
107 days until Pitchers and Catchers Report.