For as far back as I can remember, the coming of spring has meant the coming of baseball.  The cut off dates were different for school and Little League and I can still recall how disappointed I was in second grade when most of my friends could sign-up and play baseball, but I could not.  The next year I could sign-up for “minors” and I did.  I also signed up the next year and the next year and the next year until I have almost lost count.  I believe that outside of 1986 and 1987, I have played baseball or softball every year since 1968.  If I think about the years that I played on more than one softball team, I guess I have been playing for more than fifty seasons.

This evening I had the opportunity to play my first game of 2014.  A decade ago, I joked that I was going to play long enough to play softball with all three of my boys.  That happened several years ago and I have already been asked if I am going to play long enough to play with my grandson. 

Across the years a few dreams as well as a few bones have been broken on the diamond.  I played on some good teams and some bad teams, some undefeated teams and some soundly defeated teams.  Over the five years I made the Shiloh-Ft. McKinley Little League tournament team we won one game and lost six.  As a fourteen year-old, I managed to pitch a no-hitter and lose 1-0.  One year I stuck out almost fifty percent of the time and the next year I hit over .600.  But my baseball “career” was over when I turned sixteen.

But I just could not stay away from the game I enjoyed so much and so I turned to slow pitch softball.  I have been playing at church ever since with the occasional work team thrown in as a bonus.  I can still recall the day I looked at around on the Citizens Bank softball team and realized I was the oldest guy on the team, that was in 1997!

Why, at my age, do I keep playing?  For fun, when it quits being fun, it will be time to quit. But the anticipation of stepping into the batter’s box, the adrenaline of running down the first base line still trying to run out a hit, those rare instances when I can “see” the ball coming my way just as the batter begins to swing – those things keep me coming back year after year.  The hits may not be as frequent and there may be a lot more bobbles between the good plays but every once in a while there is the hit right where I want it to be or the lunge at just the right second that snags the ball and as long as those still happen occasionally, spring will find me once again longing to grab my glove and bat and head out for another game.   

The professional baseball season is a long grind, 162 games beginning in the chilly days of early spring, continuing through the hot and humid dog days of summer, and ending with the crisp autumn air of late September.  If you are lucky, you get to play on into October. 

The 1962 expansion New York Mets are considered one of the worst baseball teams of all time.  That hapless band of characters lost 120 games, yet somehow they still managed to win 40 games.  The 2001 Seattle Mariners compiled the best record over the last sixty years winning 116 games while losing 46.  So, even the worst team wins a quarter of its games and even the best team loses a quarter of its games.  So the difference between the great teams and the lousy teams really comes down to how they do in that 50% of the games that are up for grabs.

Of course talent makes a difference, but just because a team has what it thinks are the best, most talented players, does not guarantee victory (see the 1992 Mets).  It often comes down to the team that is prepared and ready to play every day.  I had a statistics professor in college who liked to call on people at random.  If you were not ready with an answer he would usually say something like, “you don’t show up at a game without your glove! You don’t go without your spikes! Why do you show up without your homework?”

My youngest son graduated recently from The Ohio State University.  The graduation speaker was Chris Matthews host of Hardball with Chris Matthews.  The main point of his address can be condensed to an admonition to graduates to “show up and be prepared.” That is good advice for graduates, for baseball players, for anyone.

Life like the baseball season is a long grind.  Show up everyday prepared and ready to play:  some days will be great and you win in spite of yourself, some days you lose no matter what you do.  But there are all those other days, days that can be won or lost that make a real difference.  In life and baseball if you keep plugging away and manage to win more than you lose you just might find that, at the end of the long season, you have safely arrived at “home” and accomplished something great.

If you know me, you probably know that the greatest passions of my life are baseball, God and family – not in that order.  So, with Opening Day upon us, my thoughts have once again turned to baseball.  If you have been unfortunate enough to be on my Friday email list for a while, what follows is something you have seen before.  

(Occasionally, I may recycle some of my old “Friday Funny” material for a blog post.)  

There is an ailment that I have been afflicted with for as far back as I can remember. As a very young boy, I was exposed to baseball and, like most boys growing up in Southwestern Ohio in the 1970’s, I caught a bad case of baseball fever. Baseball fever, like many other fevers, can cause one to lose touch with reality and to act in odd ways. As a child, I was prone to spend countless hours during the summer playing the game of baseball. If I could not find any fellow sufferers to share in a game, I would spend hours simply throwing a baseball against the back wall of my elementary school. This exercise was often accompanied by the delusion that I was pitching in the seventh game of the World Series and that the outcome hung on each and every pitch. Night brought little relief as the fever led me to sit on the front porch with my father and brother and listen to Al or Marty and the ‘ole left-hander describe a baseball game on the radio, hoping to hear phrases like “that one is OUTTA here!” and “THIS one belongs to the Reds.” On days when the weather was bad, I would spend my time studying little pieces of cardboard and memorizing the numbers and facts printed on the back or perhaps recreating the picture on the front of how each player held a bat or wound up to throw the ball. I would beg my father for some change so I could run up to the drugstore and buy more of these pieces of cardboard and the cardboard-like gum that came with them. In those days a quarter could be exchanged for five packs of baseball cards with each pack containing five cards and a stick of gum. Over the years, I have constantly guarded these treasures from harmful disasters like house cleanings and garage sales.

There were some days when baseball fever had me in a state of delirious splendor. On these very wonderful occasions, my father would take me to magical places called Crosley Field or Riverfront Stadium where I had the grand privilege of watching my heroes play this game I had come to love.

As years went on, the fever never went away. It would subside for a time, but it would always return in the spring. I moved out of Ohio for a number of years, but every year we would return to visit family and the trip would always coincide, mysteriously, with a home stand. This would invisibly, irresistibly draw me and my father, and later my sons back to a place where others gathered to watch these chosen men who somehow were fortunate enough to earn their living by playing this child’s game.

Fortune smiled and I was able to move back to Southwestern Ohio. For several years I could look out from the building in downtown Cincinnati I worked in and gaze across at Riverfront Stadium, that place I went to as a youth to see men named Morgan, Rose, Bench, Perez, Foster, Griffey, Concpecion, Geronimo, Gullet and others. Sometimes at lunch I would walk around the stadium and I could almost hear the cheers of days gone by. I was able to see Great American Ballpark rise up and take form and have seen Larkin, Casey, Griffey Jr., Votto, Phillips and Bruce begin to build the memories of a new era.

Now it is spring once again. With spring comes not only green grass and flowers, but the return of baseball fever. This is one ailment that they have not yet found a cure for and I hope they never do.