For the Last Word...The Commissioner

That would be the late, great, A. Bartlett Giamatti. Bart Giamatti was a scholar of English Renaissance Literature, with a particular passion for Edmund Spenser. He was President of Yale University. He and his wife, Toni, were the parents of three children, including the wonderful actor, Paul Giamatti. Bart was President of the National League. And on April 1, 1989, he was named the seventh Commissioner of Baseball. He served in that post until his tragically untimely death on September 1, 1989.

Giamatti was a life-long Boston Red Sox fan.

He wrote the most beautiful, most powerful and most accurate elegy for the end of any baseball season, The Green Fields of the Mind. It captures everything that needs to be said whenever your team ends your baseball season, whether in last place or hoisting the World Series trophy. First published in Yale Alumni Magazine, it was later included in a small volume of Giamatti's writings on baseball, A Great and Glorious Game.
The first paragraph captures the despondency that accompanies The End:

"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."