Before my son was born, one of the gifts I received at a baby shower was a book by Donald Hall entitled Fathers Playing Catch With Sons. The book took me back to some wonderful days in my youth when my father and I would go out back and I would pitch to him. This being the days before $95 replica jerseys, I wore a white T-shirt that I had painted with blue pinstripes and the number 41 for Tom Seaver.

I was a devoted baseball fan back then, knowing every player, collecting every card, and listening to every game on WOR radio. My father had worked for the Mets in the 60s, and I had gotten to meet the broadcast trio of Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner, and even sit backstage for a couple of sessions of Kiners postgame show Kiners Korner.

I can date when I began to fall out of love with baseball. It was June 15, 1977, the day that the Mets traded Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds. I wept, I raged, I wished violence upon Dick Young, the Daily News columnist who I held responsible for driving Seaver out of town. Three weeks earlier, a relatively unknown director named George Lucas had released a film with a 1950s-sounding title of Star Wars, and it would soon replace baseball as the object of my childhood devotion.

Reading Halls book on the eve of my sons birth unleashed a flood of memories and a conviction that I had an obligation to pass the tradition of baseball down to my son. It was the spring of 1998, and soon I and the rest of the country were transfixed as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa bore down on Roger Maris and Babe Ruth. I remember sitting in the living room of our rental house, sleep-deprived, Joseph himself asleep in my arms, watching a baseball game for the first time in twenty years.

I remember the day McGwire broke the record, September 8th. The Cardinals were playing the Cubscould it get any better than that? It happened so fast I didnt have time to call my wife into the room. McGwire hit a pitch by Steve Traschel, a soft liner that just barely cleared the fence. It was almost gentle. It took a moment for what had happened to sink in. I remember McGwire leaping into the stands to gather the entire Maris family in his enormous arms. I remember his embrace of Sammy Sosa, a sign of the friendship that seemed to have emerged during their competition. I took it all in and remembered again why I had once fallen in love with baseball.

Im olderand hopefully a bit wiserthan I was in 1977. Im less inclined to place such unreserved faith in the enormously talented and yet still fallible men who play our national game. More than in my youth, I think I know something of the temptations that flesh is heir to. But for all that, there is no denying I am saddened about the way in which that perfect summer of 1998 has been diminished.

Yesterday, the Baseball Writers of America reminded us that baseball is not just a business, not just a job, not just a form of entertainment. It is a tradition, something that must be handed on faithfully and we must guard against its corruption.

Baseball breaks your heart, Bart Giamatti once wrote. 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.