Daily Inspiration Quote by A. Bartlett Giamatti

Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar who became president of Yale and then commissioner of Major League Baseball, loved the game with a seriousness usually reserved for art or civic ritual. Saying that nothing bad accrues from baseball is not a denial of scandal or folly; it is a claim about the game’s essence and what it leaves behind in the lives it touches. The verb accrues matters. It points to what builds up over time, what habits and hopes collect in the mind and community through seasons of innings, box scores, and summer evenings.

Baseball rewards patience, attention, and memory. It teaches how to wait and still stay alert, how to accept failure without surrender, how to measure effort in small increments and trust that nine innings are enough time for a second chance. It knits generations together through a shared vocabulary and the ritual of keeping score. The slow, pastoral tempo makes room for conversation and reflection, for the stories that turn past heroes into living companions. What accumulates is fellowship, a sense of fair play bounded by clear rules, and the consolation of order restored after error.

Giamatti knew as well as anyone that harms can threaten the game from outside or within. As commissioner he barred Pete Rose for gambling, precisely to protect the integrity without which those good things cannot accrue. The line draws a distinction: the bad comes from betrayal, greed, or haste; the good is what the game itself fosters when it is kept whole. His essays, from The Green Fields of the Mind to Take Time for Paradise, treat baseball as a liberal education in freedom, discipline, and loss.

Every autumn the season ends and a small grief follows, yet even that sadness is a lesson in seasons and renewal. What remains is the residue of joy, civility, and belonging. That is the dividend he believed baseball pays to a country that cares for it.