For all the excitement and controversy of the recent Olympics, the games can never be for us what they were for the ancients, not just a sporting event but a measure of time.
The Greeks dated things by the four-year intervals between athletic competitions, by which calculus President George W. Bush took office in the 694th Olympiad. The thought isn’t likely to excite his contemporaries, save for a few high school Latin teachers.
Our chronological juices are stirred by a different athletic cycle: spring training.
It marks more than the beginning of another baseball season. The headline, “Pitchers and catchers report tomorrow” is our annual reassurance that the miracle of the earth’s renewal soon will begin.
Some years, the newspaper bearing that announcement arrives on our front steps wetted by a late winter’s icy slush. Crocuses and snowdrops have yet to peep above the half-frozen ground. Yet watching players shag fly balls on a training-camp diamond, major -league managers already can see the Promised Land.
“If we catch a few breaks and stay healthy,” they’ll say, “we should have a shot at a divisional title. Maybe more.”
Doffing their cap, they’ll spit into the chalk of a left-field foul line, as if to register their prophecy with whatever angels hold guardianship over base paths. Nor is that performance limited to skippers of true contenders. If anything, the rite is more religiously performed by managers of clubs headed nowhere.
In the yearly telling of the story, young pitchers with good speed but less control become a God-sent gift to fill out a four-man rotation. Older players huffing and puffing through around-the-field warm-up laps are touted as still having one good season left in them. Novices with patent trouble hitting breaking balls become at least outside candidates for rookie of the year.
Perpetual hope
Spring training is the prime season of optimism, baseball being a game of perpetual hope.
In that sense it remains our national pastime, whatever attendance figures might say. Professional football truly has become America’s spectator sport of choice, a veritable Sunday addiction. It is fast-paced and easily comprehensible: One set of behemoths push and shove at another, while forward passes and field-goal kicks sail overhead. It is also predictable, which makes it a bookie’s dream. Measure the girth of each team’s line, time running backs for the 40-yard dash and the odds on a game pretty much set themselves.
Still, football lacks baseball’s ultimate virtue: a training period attuned to nature’s seasons and thus to the rhythms of the human heart. Though it began as a fall sport, football is now so stretched across the calendar that the Super Bowl doesn’t even get played until the following year. So how could it possibly serve as the Olympiad of the modern mentality?
Baseball is about what the author of Ecclesiastes had in mind when he noted: “To everything there is a season.”
In winter’s dark days, fans mourn a previous year’s losses, ruminating over what might have been: “If only that ball hadn’t taken a bad hop over our third baseman’s head, we wouldn’t have been out of the pennant race.” It is a time for angry recriminations: “An idiot should have known to pull our starting pitcher before the game got out of hand.”
Then come the first small signs that the moment has come for fans to forsake sackcloth and ashes and pick up their dreams. Even as the days become perceptibly longer, painting crews hang scaffolding from upper decks and bleachers. Has anyone ever seen a football stadium get an off-season coat of paint? Maybe they do it at night. Or maybe our psyches are not hardwired to notice.
Next, teams go south for training and robins return north to nest. Finally, there is that first warm evening when tavern doors are propped open with a barstool. From inside, the voice of a television announcer can be heard, talking up a player with an unfamiliar name. “I got to like this kid’s hustle,” he’ll say, filling the sound gap between innings of a preseason game. “He’s raw, that’s true, and lacks experience in the majors. But he could make all the difference.”
Never mind that the rookie so lauded will in all probability soon be sent back to a minor league farm club. For that one night, he is our Moses and Aaron, leading us to Canaan not with a staff but a bat.
No wonder then, even if we lose interest in the game itself, we often remain fans of spring training. Truth to tell, it is not easy to keep up with baseball. It takes a lifetime of study just to master the infield fly rule.
Yet even when we decide it is no longer worth the effort, the unit by which we measure our lives remains spring training. It helps us remember the history we’ve seen with our own eyes and the part of the story we heard from our parents:
Victory in World War II was at hand when slugger Bill Nicholson reported late to spring training from his defense-plant job, then led the Cubs into the 1945 World Series. A few seasons later, America began to make good on its promise of equality for all when the Brooklyn Dodgers broke baseball’s color line and started taking Jackie Robinson to their training camp.
We knew our country was again in for a fight when Ted Williams had to miss spring training in 1953, having been called up to again fly with the Marines in Korea, just as he had in World War II. A decade later, the St. Louis Cardinals’ longtime star Stan Musial announced that he had taken his last spring training, and that same year the nation was shocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Stadium marquees
And thus, no doubt, we’ll someday recall Sept. 11 by remembering how our spirits were lifted, if only a bit, by the following spring’s training season, a reminder that after even the greatest tragedies life somehow manages to restart itself.
So watch for the ultimate harbinger of spring–stadium marquees announcing in big letters: OPENING DAY TOMORROW.
Staring up at that sign and listening carefully, you might just hear all the managers and all the team announcers of years past. They’ll be speaking as a chorus, but just a bit out of synchronism–like the reverberating echoes of a ballpark’s loudspeakers. They’ll be singing the praises of all the hotshot players of today’s team. They’ll explain how our sore-armed reliever could still pull off some late-inning saves, and that our aches-and-pains cleanup hitter will knock a few more out of the park. Then they will draw out the logic of their rundown of the team’s roster. Once more, they’ll give us our annual message of hope, predicting: “This could be our year … year … year.”
