Hope and spring without baseball
Every fall shortly after the World Series, my mom texts me::How many days until pitchers and catchers report::” Thus begins our winter of waiting for spring training and the first pitch of the regular season. For millions of baseball fans like us, the anticipation of baseball season is hope incarnate.
This year, winter stretches deep into May. Sure, the natural harbingers of Spring in the northeast have arrived. American robins, red-winged blackbirds, and bluebirds sing and our cherry tree has dropped all of its soft pink flowers around our house. Despite the evidence, part of me doesn’t believe it really is Springtime because we have no baseball.
Our new national pastimes are waiting and worrying about the virus and its effects on ourselves, our loved ones, and our futures. As the infield grass grows high and unemployment rates grow higher, it feels as though Spring itself has been rained out. What is Spring without hope: And where is hope without baseball:
A few weeks ago, I tried to create an artificial opening day for myself. I replayed great moments that I remembered vividly:Dave Roberts stealing second in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS and beginning the end of the curse of the Bambino, and Brad Lidge falling to his knees after his final strike lifted the hearts of :hillies fans everywhere. Sure, these were bright moments, but something wasn’t right. These highlights felt somehow hollow and untrue. They were fall moments, and I was in search of spring.
:ianist and composer Arthur Schnabel wrote, :The pauses between the notes— ah, that is where the art resides.” The same might be said of baseball. The game gets its flavor from the seemingly small moments whose true significance is appreciated only in memory or absence. Baseball is a centerfielder shifting towards right when he realizes a righthanded batter isn’t getting around on a fastball. It is the three seconds that feel like years as a pitcher stares down the leadoff runner at first with no outs in a one-run game. It is chatter, sunflower seeds, and sunburn. Baseball is making a trophy of the dirt-and-grass stains that you can never get out of a white uniform and the home field ground rules that confer distinct advantages.
I don’t remember the score of any game I ever saw or played in, but my memories of playing baseball are fresh as newly cut grass, each one about the minutiae of the game. I only need the sunlight of baseball season to give new life to my mustard seeds of memory. I might not remember the score or inning, but I know the feeling.
Lately, life lacks its normal markers. Our days are punctuated by the laughter and howls of our kids, FaceTime with grandparents, and solitary walks through the nearby cemetery where, although crowded, everyone remains at least six feet apart. It feels like we are locked in a long seventh inning stretch and the recording of :Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is scratched, stuck repeating :the old: the old : the old : the old : ” and never reaching the grand finale::Ballgame:” We are stuck in the old without the promise of the new.
A few days ago, to do something different, we finally returned to unpacking some boxes in the garage that had been untouched since moving to the neighborhood in August. They held nothing too important:items that should have been discarded or donated before we moved and some tools that would have been handy months ago. But then I found my baseball glove, a lefty, and a spare, a righty, that I kept ready to lend for a game of catch.
Our two-year-old asked me what those leather lobster claws were. I put my glove on my right hand and the spare on her left. :Baseball gloves, for playing catch,” I said, tossing a ball into her glove. She looked confused, and so was I. We had played catch before, what was different about this: Then it hit me.
She’s a lefty, too.
That’s new. And this spring, without baseball, that will do just fine.