By Bob Gaydos

    The world is in the third year of a deadly pandemic, Russia has started a brutal war in Europe, the United States is still reeling from an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of white nationalists trying to overturn a presidential election, one of the country’s two major political parties has become a.cult led by a con man with fascist DNA … and there’s no baseball.

     Take it easy. I’m not putting the Major League Baseball lockout in the same category as the grab bag of historic events dominating our lives today (and I’ll add global warming). That’s actually the point.

     When the world goes, well, to hell, a person needs somewhere safe to go for a break. Sports in general and, in the bleak of February especially, baseball has filled that need for me.

     February typically means the Super Bowl ends the football season and pitchers and catchers report to spring training to start the new baseball season. But there was nothing typical with this February. With the contract between players and owners expired and no new agreement ready to be signed, team owners locked the doors to training facilities in Florida and Arizona. No contract, no getting into shape at our digs. Dumb.

       Both sides then toughened their negotiating stances in the contest between billionaires and millionaires on how to share the wealth from TV deals and over-priced tickets. And Rob Manfred, MLB commissioner, started talking about delaying the start of the season or shortening it. Dumber.

     Since my mid-teens, I have followed the practice of the late Chief Justice Earl Warren by turning to the sports pages to start my day. Time enough for the rest of the world. Sports for the most part is safe conflict. No one really gets hurt, except the gamblers.

     But lockouts and shortened seasons are not the headlines baseball fans were looking for. Not safe.

      Nor smart, from a business sense. Think about it. With all the grim news in the world and having already surrendered the national pastime crown to football by focusing on how fast a baseball can get to home plate and how much faster it can leave the park, baseball decision-makers blew a golden opportunity to grab some attention and provide some stress relief with positive, non-confrontational news. New contract! Who’s the talk of training camp? A comeback story? No more starting extra innings with a runner on second base?

       Instead, we got Derek Jeter quitting as boss of the Marlins because they apparently don’t want to win as much as he does, bigger bases to improve the success rate of stolen base attempts, a lockout and Opening Day pushed back two weeks. 

       Oh yeah, and no more shifts because major league hitters apparently can no longer hit it where they ain’t.

      You blew it, baseball. Fans were looking for a hit-and-run. Instead, they got an intentional walk. You picked a really bad time to play moneyball.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com. 

By Gretchen Gibbs

Well, the baseball season has opened, and already on Thursday the Mets (the team I root for) were behind by two games in the NL East standings. The Yankees were playing .500 ball and were tied for first place in the AL East with Tampa Bay and Toronto. It seems a good time to reflect on my recent baseball experience.

I’ve always wanted to attend spring training, but this was the first year I managed it. I would have gone to Port St. Lucie, where the Mets train, but I have a sister in the Clearwater/Tampa/St. Pete area, and I wanted to see her, too. My sister’s condo turned out to be five minutes from the Phillies training site in Clearwater, and I saw two games there, one against the Braves and one with the Yankees. I also drove five miles to Dunedin to see the Toronto Blue Jays camp, and watched them play the Tampa Bay Rays.

The thing I realized about spring training is that it doesn’t matter who wins.

Nobody really cares. Not the players, not the managers, not even the spectators. Tie games are usually ended after nine innings. And when you take away the tension about who’s ahead, something else emerges. It’s a relaxed camaraderie in the stands. More attention is paid to the sparkling plays – the incredible catches against the wall, the diving catches in the infield, the home run hit over the wall and onto the berm where young children are picnicking with their parents.

There is the smell of buttered popcorn and beer and hotdogs. There is a certain background crowd noise at a baseball stadium that I haven’t heard elsewhere. It’s kind of a steady hum, a soothing “white noise.” And the vast stretches of green, now Astro Turf even in Florida, and speaking, “summer, summer, summer.” It was March but in Florida it was already summer. Spring training is quintessential summer.

I saw a few things I’d never seen before. For example, just as at big league ballparks, the walls of the stadium are padded panels that players can bang against without hurting themselves too much. In one game, a batter hit the ball sharply to the wall, and it disappeared. Nobody could figure out what happened. The two closest fielders were scratching their heads and there was muttering in the stands. It turned out the ball found a path between the panels, never to be recovered. They played it as a ground-rule double.

I loved the Phillie Phanatic and wished the Mets had a decent mascot. The Fanatic goes around the field and stirs up the fans with his dancing and good-natured taunting of the opposition players. Mets fans and Phillies fans generally don’t like each other, and it was instructive to sit with a bunch of folks from Philadelphia and see how their feelings about baseball were just like mine.

I liked the experience of seeing a game with a Canadian team in Florida. At the stadium in Dunedin, they sang “O Canada” at the start of the game. The vendors ply you with Labatt instead of Bud. The crowds were full of folks from Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, all willing to tell you their winter stories.

I would happily replace the regular season with six months of spring training. Nobody talked about drugs or salaries or trades or whether the franchise will survive.

It was just a game. As Roger Angell said, “The Summer Game.”