Could someone, please, explain the ending?

Since the tiger is on the verge of extinction I think we are supposed to draw a parallel between that and the idea that Lemmon's character is also on the verge of extinction, in the sense that he's at the end of his rope, all his dreams having died long ago. And yes, I think baseball reminds him of innocence and also simplicity and a time when there were heroes and ideals to look up to. The Myra storyline is just to contrast the carefree nature of youth with middle-age burnout. I think. That's how I see the film anyway.

There is the suggestion that Harry gets caught and sent to jail - the way he admonishes the arsonist to keep his partner's name out of it should things go wrong and the way he tells the kids he thought they should see his great arm one time ie before he's put away.

Harry's given up completely and yet Myra - sweet, loving, young, positive-thinking - is a symbol of hope in an otherwise hopeless world of eroding values. It may be too late for Harry, but not for others - the tiger may yet be saved.

There may have been some recurring theme about Harry feeling responsible for his fellow man (the men he served with in the military and his employees) and a horrific sense of utter failure in both regards.

The Tiger going into extinction is a metaphor for Lemmon's character, who refers to himself as a "dying breed" (the scene with the crazy cab driver). His current situation with all of its stresses makes him regress more and more to bygone days, memories in which he begins to take refuge, even mumbling to himself about the old baseball greats and so on. He talks to his wife (who is in NY for a funeral) and begins to "reminisce" about the good old days, but his wife just gets upset and says: "that was only six years ago."

So his mode of regression, his pathological wistfulness, nostalgia, and yearning for things past are broaching his present, they are catching up to him; as much as his present keeps deconstructing into the past, he himself begins to empathize with dying beasts (the whale in the newspaper (beginning of movie, he mentions it again later in the movie) and the breed of tiger going extinct), as the world of his past is going extinct (WW2, his war-buddies, all the people that he mentions in the "names" game he plays with the hippie-girl (all those mentioned are the "extinct" people of what he considers to be the golden past)), so he feels the world that he once knew, the hopes and dreams he once had, the person that he once was, are all going extinct, fading into the oblivion of non-existence.

The movie is his battle with "impermanence," it's a Gestalt of how nothing stays the same, and how the ego, taking refuge in the idea of what once was and was familiar, begins to fall apart at the seams. He _is_ on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the end of the movie (at the kid's baseball game) implies it: he can't even relate to children any more, as he overthrows the ball way beyond the fence; he thinks in his deluded mind that somehow he's being an impressive role model (of how a man played ball, once upon a time), but all he gets is rejection. "You can't play with us, mister." That's the bottom line of his exitstence as a man who has become stuck in the past. Thus he quietly walks behind the fence, and he is behind the fence, and the metaphor of the tiger is there, yet again, caged behind the fence; caged in the past, unable to enter the present.

"The Tiger" is America. It's been sold to foreign, cheap labor by the filthy rich who control everything. What you see happening to Harry has now spread over the entire continent.

I love this film. It has so many rich ideas, metaphors, imageries, and characters. One of them would be the tiger. At first, we believe that Lemmon's character is the tiger that needs salvation. But by the end of the film, we realize that he wants Phil to be saved if his arson plot fails. Thus he tells the arsonist to leave Phil out of the plot. Phil is the "tiger" because he is that rare but nearly extinct species that still upholds noble and traditional values, who wants nothing to do with the arson plot, wants Lemmon to walk the right path, and laments the rotting state of society. On the other hand, Lemmon has become far too corrupted for salvation (even though he still has a lot of humanity left, like when he tries to give money to Myra and lends his support to Meyer). He knows it but is too trapped to walk away. Thus he feels a lot of remorse and does a lot of reminiscing back to better and more innocent times (like baseball).

My take is a bit different. While the "Tiger" symbol is used in the movie, the metaphor is that Harry "has a tiger by the tail" in his self-destructive lifestyle and is afraid to let go.

The business is dying and with it would go his lifestyle, all the self-image of a successful businessman. If he let the business go he could get a job and just be another person living a better more normal life but he cannot let go of the tiger's tail. He burns the business for money to save his lifestyle, sacrificing the last of his integrity to "Save the Tiger".

I believe the ending is all about nostalgia. Harry is in that mode of life where he's being nostalgic about when he was playing baseball as a kid. The more Harry moves on into old age the more he longs for the innocence of his childhood and his stress free days on the playing field. After so much stress recently, his guilt about surviving the war, his desperation to save his business, his struggling marriage, he got a good dose of perspective from the hippie girl. After all that, at the end of the movie Harry is so elated to throw that ball again and right away the kid tells him he can't play with them. So what is Harry longing for? Does he want to play baseball again? does he want his business to thrive? does he want to have sex with the hippie girl on a regular basis? Does he want his marriage to get back on track? Yes, and no,,what Harry is longing for is his long, lost youth. That's why Save the Tiger is all about nostalgia, just like brushing up against someone on a train, or the way the movie theater smelled 30 years ago; you can never go back.