To Cure What Ails You

SALEM--Spring training started yesterday.  Not the sunny one down in Southern Southizona, with the charming man-boy millionaires of summer jogging in mesh jerseys.  Spring training started yesterday in my back yard.

It started when I came home from work all of a funk.  Too many hours in front of a computer screen, too many days of wearing a tie, too many evenings in a very fine recliner.  Despite my poor patient wife’s ministrations I was irreconcilable.

I have learned in my years that there is a certain simple joy to be found in the essential tasks of sport: a clean dive into a chilly pool, the union of a receiver with a tightly spiraling football, the neatly described arc of a 21-foot bank shot; but the triumph of them all is a well timed reversal of a pitched ball just over the heads of the infield.

This will cure what ails you.

My wife is the Commissioner of this league tonight; she drafted me, the 8-year-old, the 4-year-old, and the baby, who I put in an oversized stocking cap, propped up in the stroller, and instructed her to call my balls and strikes.  (Her zone was a little narrow, but it’s early on in the season.)  The wife drafted us straight out to the back yard so she could get dinner finished without my grumbling wrecking up the flavor.

The 8-year-old, he comes from the left side, with a duck-toed stance and a dangerous bat for anything I left up too high.  The 4-year-old is a rookie right-hander with a close stance, a fat bat, and a pair of Oshkosh overalls.

I pitched—from the stretch, and fielded the zingers both of them tapped all the way back to my long-suffering neighbor’s fence.  Those two whopped good long hits, even for the little guy; and they scrambled around the tree and back to the wall, which our ground rules state is a single and a home run all in one if you can make it back to the wall without me throwing the ball at you.  (I’ll admit I went all out to tater the 8-year-old, but missed mostly, and only half-stepped it after the 4-year-old’s grounders.)

The 8-year-old cracked one of the hard plastic wiffle balls almost all the way around, proud when I showed it to him nearly bisected into hemispheres.  The 4-year-old mostly wanted to wear the batter’s helmet, kept it on even in the field a la John Olerud.  Mrs. Commish came out to let us know dinner was ready, and to watch the rookie sensation hit.

We tromped inside.  My midwinter blues had dissipated amidst the sharp cold air and the sharply batted balls and the boys’ heels turned up speeding along the base paths.  Here is another thing I’ve learned in my years.  Here is something better than a clean catch or a square hit, here is a subtle joy pieced together bit by bit, not unlike the game itself: to watch your son strike a plastic curve ball, to see his knees twist and bend in the follow-through, his hand dismiss the bat, to see his small face upturned to follow his clean single through the chill blue air.

That will cure what ails you.

An Inkling of Spring

KEIZER--Driving down by the local ballpark with a few extra moments to spare this morning.   If Yankee Stadium is the St. Peter's of ballparks, then this is a strip-mall church-front.  Plenty of parking, blocky cement construction, and rather uncomfortable aluminum bleachers sloping lazily.

But it's all the same inside, right?  Without the banners from the local Painless Dentist's office, et al, hanging on the outfield fence, I can see the elements of this homely park patterned together to make a ball field: the mathematically precise corner at home base; the pitcher's hill sixty and one half feet away; the flag pole, empty today, upright next to the scoreboard; the short porch in left field with a picnic slope behind it; the on-deck circles and the casual, unfenced bullpens along the foul lines.

There is plenty going on in the world today: riots in Egypt are toppling the world's oldest country, the first twenty-five miles of road is paved in South Sudan, the world's newest country.  Earthquake refugees homeless in their homeland in Haiti, a congresswoman in hospital, shot, while I imagine her cold-hearted, pallid assailant languishes in the pink stripes usually reserved for captured Mexican immigrants.

And though its permanence doesn't fix any of those things, the ball field doesn't change.  Still ninety feet to first.  Still a loose-armed swing of the batter warming up as he looks down to the pitcher and reads the infield.  Still a cheerful hum from the stands, a pattern of licorice and popcorn sold, shirt numbers called over the loudspeaker, batters cheered.  All together, a soft summer sound like the breeze in the trees or a brook over stones.  I can hear it in the memory of my ears.

The world is not perfect today.  Baseball will never be as important as riots, infrastructure, or earthquakes.  Indeed, there is a strong argument to be made that sport is unimportant, petty, a simple diversion for the little-minded.  But here at the ball park, the lines will be precise, the measurements on the outfield walls exact, the chalk lines bright and square.  The umpires will be just and impartial.  The grass will be bristling and full green, the lights will come on, children will clap and smile, players will dream of bigger things and bigger parks.  The world will be no more perfect tomorrow, though perhaps this ball park, and a hundred others—school yards to Camden Yards—can encircle some small spheres of near-perfection in the midst of it all, just for a few hours at a time.

This morning was cold and bright, a sunny anomaly that we Northwesterners recognize as a false prophet of summer, a week of pseudo-spring that belies the rainy months yet to come.  The field was still patchy and yellowy-green, the infield dirt was crumbly and pitted.  The parking lot was empty.  The digital billboard blasted ads for an upcoming RV show.

But.  But the sky is blue, the sun is shining (coldly yet) on the grass, and pitchers and catchers report in two weeks.