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The Story of “Green Fields of the Mind”
How a class notes column became a baseball classic.
September/October 2012
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Mark Alden Branch ’86 is executive editor of the Yale
Alumni Magazine.
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your
heart.”
When Boston Red Sox fans hear those words on the radio,
it means one thing: once again, the baseball season is over. Every year, after
the final out, Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione reads a portion of “The
Green Fields of the Mind,” an account of the last day of the 1977 Sox season,
by former Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti ’60, ’64PhD. More than one listener has been known to shed a
discreet tear.
The essay, first published in this magazine 35 years
ago, has become a bittersweet staple of baseball literature. Giamatti was a lifelong Red Sox fan who became commissioner
of Major League Baseball after retiring as president of Yale. In “Green Fields”
he describes his emotions during the radio broadcast of that game in ’77: the
Sox are about to tie Baltimore, and a win will let them extend their season
into the playoffs—and if they do, “the summer will not pass.” For Giamatti, as long as the Sox can keep playing baseball,
“school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck
forever.”
But something darker is on Giamatti’s mind; this is his 40th summer, he writes, and “there comes a time when every
summer will have something of autumn about it.” In the end, Baltimore wins, and
the summer is over.
“The Green Fields of the Mind” has become a favorite of
journalists and others who love to wax romantic about baseball. Before a
reading of the piece in 1989, Giamatti told the story
of how it first saw print in 1977 in the Yale Alumni Magazine. He was
secretary for his college class, and one afternoon when “I had absolutely
nothing to say about my classmates,” he wrote “Green Fields” instead, and
submitted it as class notes. The piece was, in his words, “properly and
immediately” rejected as unsuitable for the class notes section. But two months
later, when he became president of Yale, it was resurrected for use in the
magazine’s op-ed section.
“He thought it was just fluff,” says his son Marcus Giamatti ’87MFA, an actor who
also writes about baseball. “He’d be flattered, and sort of shocked, to know
how popular it’s become.”
Roberto González Echevarría,
the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature, says the essay
sounds like the Giamatti he remembers. “We’d meet in
the street,” says González Echevarría, who played semipro
baseball himself, “and he’d always be lamenting the Red Sox. I’d say, ‘You Red
Sox fans have only one mode of discourse: lamentation. What will happen when
they win?’ It is this gloom that permeates that essay.”
Giamatti spent three years as
president of the National League and five months as commissioner before dying
of a heart attack on September 1, 1989, at the age of 51. His untimely death
made the theme of mortality in “Green Fields” especially poignant.
To Castiglione, a New Haven native whose family knew Giamatti’s, the piece has a universal appeal. “I get a lot
of response from listeners,” he says. “It’s meaningful, especially for Red Sox
fans, who’ve had such a lot of heartbreak.”
In recent years, of course, the Sox’s fabled
curse—their prolonged inability to win a World Series—has been broken; they won
the Series in 2004 and 2007. “It’s too bad Bart couldn’t have been around for
the world championship,” says Castiglione. But could Giamatti have accepted a summer with a happy ending, stretching all the way to a World
Series triumph?
“He would have waxed poetic about it,” says
Castiglione. “He would have found a way.”  |
