“It breaks your heart,” writes Bart Giamatti in the first paragraph of his first essay, “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.” With that opening sentence, Giamatti’s words seize even casual fans of baseball and only releases them when his untimely death silences his pen.

A Great and Glorious Game is a collection of essays, speeches and executive decisions from Bart Giamatti, a Yale PhD in comparative literature who became President of the National League, then Commissioner of Major League Baseball, an office he held just five months before he died. Quite fortunately for fans of baseball—or of America—Giamatti is a PhD in literature who is also an exquisite writer (a rarer combination than it should be).

A reader will find his thoughts on the men of the game, both those of great character like Tom Seaver (“…among all the men who play baseball there is, very occasionally, a man of such qualities of heart and mind and body that he transcends even the great and glorious game, and that such a man is to be cherished, not sold.), those of flawed character: Kevin Gross (“Mr. Gross exhibited a reckless disregard for the reputation and good name of his teammates, club and league and for the integrity of the game.”) and Pete Rose (“One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts that have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts.”) and even the umpires (“Spectator and fan alike may, perhaps at times must, object to his judgement, his interpretation, his grasp of precedent, procedure and relevant doctrine. Such dissent is encouraged, is valuable, and rarely, if ever, is it successful.”).

Likewise, a reader will hear Giamatti chide the owners and striking players of the league (“Go back to work. You will lose a country if you impose autumn on a people who need and deserve a summer…”) and the fans (“To sports fans: clean up your act.”)

But the heartbeat of the book is Giamatti’s lyrical contemplations on the game itself, its preeminent place in American character and baseball as a narrative. Here we find why the game breaks our heart. Here we find all the patterns of the game. We find why “home” (“an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues”) plate is a metaphor for the game and a nation (“Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and about how driven is our need.”). We discover how the game is tied to the earth and nature, and loosed from time. Likewise, the author crafts metaphors from Eden and ball parks, the autumn and the Fall.

Giamatti also reveals why the game is so enmeshed in our character: “the baseball field and the game that sanctifies boundaries, rules, and law and engages cunning, theft and guile; that exalts energy, opportunism, and execution while paying lip service to management, strategy, and long-range planning…for the immigrant, the game was a club to belong to, another fraternal organizatoin, a common language in a strange land…It was neither chic nor déclassé to care about baseball. It was simply part of being an American.”

Read the book if you love—or even are mildly interested in—baseball. Read it to learn something of the American character. Or read it just to enjoy excellent writing. But read it you must.

Baseball, says Giamatti, “is the Romance Epic of homecoming that America sings to itself.” This all-too-short collection of his writing is a Great and Glorious Book about a Great and Glorious Game. ( )

This is a must read for those with even an inkling of an interest in baseball. Giamatti is a compelling writer, and his idealism in and passion for America's sport shines brightly. This is going right on my favorites! ( )