Ready for Baseball, Ready for Spring

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” Rogers Hornsby



"Waiting to take the field" (hachmom)

Sunday afternoon, once Easter dinner was over, the countdown began.  "Three more hours, mom" he announced. "Two more hours." He was counting down to the moment when the first Major League Baseball game of the season would air on TV.   We didn't care who was playing (Texas vs Houston, if there must be an official record). We cared only that it was the first official ballgame we had seen since last October. 

The Boy has been chomping at the bit for some baseball for weeks now.  Once pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, and  his own high school practices started he walked around the house with a baseball in his hand, and took mock swings in the middle of the living room.  He endlessly discoursed on what he would do this season, what the Indians would do this season, and for a change of topic, what the rest of the major league teams would do this season.

I mind this not a bit, because I am ready for baseball too. Also I am ready for spring.  Its been a rather dreary winter here in  Ohio, without even a really good snowstorm to shut things down for a day or two.  The only "snow day" the kids had  was in October, when the outer edge of Hurricane Sandy took out a lot of trees and power lines and closed schools for a day.  So what better sign of impending spring than the resumption of baseball?

Well, in Ohio, the answer is maybe. In 2007 the Indians home opener was memorably snowed out in the 5th inning. At the time their pitcher was throwing a no hitter, partly because the ball could not be seen through the snow.

credit: cleveland.com

But this year we seem to be stumbling upon signs of Spring.  The snow has melted.  The days have been sunny, if unseasonably cool.  The daffodils are trying to come up. And the Boy's team played their first game this Monday night.  They lost, the score being a lot to nothing, but the Boy still felt good when he got home.  He had played some baseball.

This year's season will be especially poignant because the Boy is a senior, and it is probably the last competitive baseball he will get to play. He has been doing this since he was 5.

 photos by hachmom



But for now, at least for the Boy and his mother, baseball has arrived and with it Spring, giving us reason to celebrate, something green to believe in.



"I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun. "
 A. Bartlett Giamatti

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