Hope springs eternal, and never more so than in spring. So the thousands of forlorn Cubs fans who streamed, as Cubs fans have streamed from thousands of losing games over the past 101 years of futility, from Chase Field after a spring training loss Friday will be excused for waking up this morning with hope again.
That’s one of the beauties of baseball. When it begins in the spring, fans try to be reasonable. They know, objectively, that their team is too young, or too old, or too cursed, or the Royals. But when they see spring training reports on television, and see their teams’ uniforms bright and crisp against the perfect grass, well, only a cynic could avoid thinking that maybe, just maybe, if the pitching holds up, and the rookie second baseman hits, and the bullpen performs — maybe this will be our year.
Another beauty of baseball is how it has a way of sticking with you. When you’re a kid, it’s all you can think about. At least it was for me. Then you get older, and other things happen. Everyone stops playing. Life gets bigger, and baseball seems smaller by comparison. But the older you get, the better you understand the game, at least if you keep watching. I think maybe a few people, a chosen few, might get total baseball enlightenment on their deathbeds. The whole thing will come into focus, and they’ll just bathe in the glory of it.
But for most of us, baseball is just another mystery, another thing on Earth that we’re too small to grasp.
People talk about the old days — that’s part of baseball too. There’s a dusty attic filled with history in baseball like no other sport has. Baseball is sepia and summers. When you play the game — at five, at fifteen, at fifty — you take your place in a long, unbroken line of grandfathers and fathers and sons. Pitching and catching, picking up grounders, running down a ball in the gap — these things don’t change.
But people like to say baseball has changed. Every year someone writes a column about how the game was good once, when it was young, and how night games and steroids and the designated hitter have ruined it. About how today’s players are entitled and foolish and about how they wear their jerseys too loose.
But baseball hasn’t changed, not really. That’s part of what makes it so remarkable. Great players hit .300, even if we have other stats now. The bases are still 90 feet apart, and that’s still the perfect distance. Superstars are still classy and elegant—Gehrig begat DiMaggio, DiMaggio begat Ripken, Ripken begat Pujols, and so it goes. The villains now don’t even look so bad, when you consider Ty Cobb, who everyone hated, and who hated them right back.
They once asked Rogers Hornsby, a baseball man, a man so dedicated that he wouldn’t go to the movie theatres because he was afraid he would harm his eyesight, what he did during the baseball offseason. He didn’t know how to answer, so he said, “I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
Well, spring is here.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu or at a ballpark near you.
