Opening Day!

It's winter here this first week in February, just like everywhere else, of course. The yard is a dingy gray/brown, except for the few iris that were seduced by the brief January warm spell. "Cold enough for you?" opens every conversation. We're still singing Epiphany hymns, and Easter seems a long way off. No neighbors are out walking. We seem to be surrounded by winter, except for one place, one oasis: the green yard of Brooks Field, home of the UNC-W Seahawks baseball team, where it's always springtime.

Baseball is back, and life is good. Today we play our first game of the season, taking on Western Kentucky, followed by Oklahoma and South Carolina to round out the weekend. It's not professional baseball with its mega-million dollar athletes and stadiums (stadia?) where you sit in a different Area Code from the field and pay $10.00 for a lukewarm dog. It's college ball, where you chat with the players before the game and the coach sits three pews in front of you in church and the hotdogs are two for a buck on Fridays.

I'm not sure just where I picked up my affection for the game. My father, to some extent, who never talked to me about sex or politics or other things fathers are supposed to pass on to sons. He just took me to ball games, and to one I'll always remember in Yankee Stadium. Years later Ann and I went back to Yankee Stadium for their annual Old Timers Game where we saw DiMaggio and Rizutto and Ford and all those heroes who made me misty-eyed.

Another time I got misty-eyed from baseball was on a trip we were taking through the mid-west. As we traveled the gently rolling hills of eastern Iowa, seeing nothing but corn fields and telephone poles and telephone poles and cornfields, we suddenly crested one of those hills and right in front of us was the extravagantly beautiful Field of Dreams, the original site of the movie. It was a Sunday afternoon, Fathers' Day, and the field was filled with dads and kids, playing ball. No admission fee, no billboards, no hucksters, just baseball.

It's so simple, baseball is, and yet so complex. The trinity of strikes and outs, three times three innings and players, and though baseball puts a premium on speed of throw and foot, it's unhurried and unlimited by time. Baseball is not dangerous, like football or boxing, but if you've ever stood in the batter's box and watched a fast ball head toward you, you know fear. The field itself is laid out in a deliberately defined algorithm of 90 feet between bases, 60 feet 6 inches from home plate to the pitcher's rubber which is always 24 inches by 6 inches set on a 15 inch mound within an 18 foot circle.

Then there's the box score, what Bart Giamatti called the diamond in the mind, an artifice no other sport has been able to conjure up. What a work of art it is! To compress all that action in a few words and numbers gives baseball fans a daily treasure to explore with all the devotion of priests studying their scriptures. We don't "glance" at our team's box scores, we recreate the game with it.

Sometimes I hear the comment that baseball's "boring", an observation that could only be made by the Immediately Generation, those for whom instant gratification is too slow. To watch the strategy of the pitch selection and see how the defense responds, to see how playing for one run is far more challenging than a grand slam, to know that getting 26 outs is never enough...boring? Sure, just like "King Lear" is boring and Yorkshire Pudding is boring and the sunrise is boring.

So this afternoon in early February, scorecard in hand and a pocket full of peanuts, I'll head for the ball park. And life will be good again.