GrizBiz
Well-known member
Pitchers and Catcher Report.
Regardless of your team affiliation, those have to be four of the sweetest sounding words in the engligh language to a baseball fan.
As a fan of both football (college, mostly these days) and baseball (until college teams dump the metal bats I refuse to recognize that they even play), I think this piece expresses the difference between the two sports pretty well. Football is passion, baseball is pastime.
By Mike Celizic
Feb 12, 2007
It's that time of year - pitchers and catchers are reporting - which means it can't be long before someone points out that baseball isn't America's No. 1 sport, and from that the conclusion will be drawn that it's no longer America's pastime.
It will be a false conclusion, because what baseball means to America can't be measured in the number of people who call it their favorite sport. It is today what it's always been - a way to pass the time, the leitmotif of our summer.
Football is America's passion, a 16-game season so intense it takes 17 weeks to play it, a game crafted for Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings and Monday night, but still out of place anywhere else. We get cranked up for football games, spending days to work ourselves into a pregame lather and more days to decompress when it's over.
Basketball is America's game, invented right here, although by a Canadian; the game of the city that perfectly expresses the national need for big scores and the individual need of every player to have a chance to be a hero on every play.
But neither of them is a proper pastime, still the perfect epithet for this most unassuming and magical of games; unassuming because its object is so basic - to hit a ball with a stick; magical because of its roots that burrow so deeply into our culture and history.
It is a way to keep time. Pitchers and catchers is a far more certain sign of the coming spring than a rodent's shadow. Opening Day nudges us gently into six months during which the game revisits us for three or four hours nearly every day. The curtain on the final act, the Fall Classic, falls with the last leaves from trees buttoning up for the coming winter.
Think of all the times that a baseball game saved you. You can follow a baseball game almost anywhere. Anyone who's driven into a long summer's night knows the joy of finding a ballgame on a distant AM station and straining through the static to follow the narrative while the miles roll by.
You stop in a bar, and the ballgame's on, and when you head home, it stays with you on the radio until you can pick it up again. And if there's something else you want to watch at home, you can call up the pitch-by-pitch on your computer, tuning in just often enough to follow a favorite pitcher or the at-bats of your slugging hero.
Football and basketball demand your total attention, the play leaving no gaps in which to insert a thought or a conversation. Baseball is background music, a familiar cadence carrying you from one vital moment to the next. If you miss it, no problem: there's plenty of time to replay it, dissect it, cheer it, lament it.
And there's another game tomorrow. Unlike football, in which a loss lasts a week, if your team loses a baseball game, the pain evaporates with the morning dew. In no other sport do the words apply as they do in baseball: "We'll get 'em tomorrow."
The daily dose of hope is a tonic. Towards the end of his life, it kept my father alive for one more summer despite the best efforts of modern medicine.
He had grown up on the East Side of Cleveland, not far from League Park, where the Indians used to play their games. During his final year, when the surgeons were lopping off parts of his limbs and telling him he'd get out of the bed he never got out of, he told me about sneaking into the park or peering through cracks in the outfield fence to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and the other heroes of the day.
He didn't have either the time or the money to take us to many games when we were growing up, and I never knew how much he loved it until the end, when he spent the long days in a nursing home waiting for 7 o'clock and the Indians game on television. Cleveland had last won a World Series in 1948, when he was young and strong and fresh from service in the South Pacific. He kept hoping they'd win it again and he'd see it.
So he stayed alive for one more summer, the ballgames pulling him - and not a few others in the senior-citizen barracks that had become his home - from day to day, week to week, month to month.
The Indians didn't make the playoffs that year, but he stuck it out until the end, then stayed around for the joy of seeing the Yankees lose the World Series. A couple of weeks later, he died. I figure he knew he wasn't going to make it to spring training, so there wasn't any sense trying.
We were vastly different people who didn't agree on a lot of things, but it didn't matter. We had baseball to talk about. Sure, we talked football, too, but you couldn't keep that going long. Only baseball can consume whole days. I mean, he saw Babe Ruth play. Tell me about it, Dad. Tell me about it.
I didn't see the Babe, but I feel that I did, and not just because of the newsreel footage of a barrel-chested man running with mincing steps on spindly legs around the bases after another prodigious clout.
I know him as I know so many others I never saw because I've read about them. Nearly every great sports book I've read is about baseball and the men who played it. It's somewhat absurd how baseball fanatics are about the game's sacred numbers; no other sport is similarly obsessed. But it's also part of the game's charm, and it allows us to really care about people who were dead before our grandparents were born.
You know what makes baseball great? I don't have to describe it or say anything about it to conjure a thousand visions in your mind. All I have to do is say the Splendid Splinter, the Man, Hammerin' Hank, the Mick, Eck, the Rocket, Joe D., Rickey, Doc, Lefty, Boomer, Satch, Jackie Robinson, Newk, the Duke, the Say Hey Kid, the Candy Man, Pops, No-mah, Charlie Hustle, the Hawk, Knucksie, Whitey, Papi, the Babe, Nails, Junior.
It doesn't matter if you're 90 or 9, there's a name in there that you can see in the flesh just by hearing it. There's dirt and sweat and pine tar and line drives and double plays and home runs and stolen bases and big outs and bigger runs swirling through your mind's eye with those names. There's lazy summers and urgent Octobers in those names. There's beer and Coke and hot dogs and peanuts and emerald fields and box scores.
Is there anything like a baseball box score? Before the Internet, America woke up to a page of them in agate type in the back of the sports section and inhaled them with the morning's first cup of coffee. Today, you may check them on the Web before turning in, or at the office, when you fire up your computer and start pretending to work.
It's there for you always, and you can skip a game or even a week without feeling your life will end. Push the button on the dashboard and a familiar voice - a man you probably think you actually know because of all the stories he's told you over the years - picks it up in mid-count.
Three-and-two, go-ahead run at second, two outs. Here's the windup ..
Regardless of your team affiliation, those have to be four of the sweetest sounding words in the engligh language to a baseball fan.
As a fan of both football (college, mostly these days) and baseball (until college teams dump the metal bats I refuse to recognize that they even play), I think this piece expresses the difference between the two sports pretty well. Football is passion, baseball is pastime.
By Mike Celizic
Feb 12, 2007
It's that time of year - pitchers and catchers are reporting - which means it can't be long before someone points out that baseball isn't America's No. 1 sport, and from that the conclusion will be drawn that it's no longer America's pastime.
It will be a false conclusion, because what baseball means to America can't be measured in the number of people who call it their favorite sport. It is today what it's always been - a way to pass the time, the leitmotif of our summer.
Football is America's passion, a 16-game season so intense it takes 17 weeks to play it, a game crafted for Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings and Monday night, but still out of place anywhere else. We get cranked up for football games, spending days to work ourselves into a pregame lather and more days to decompress when it's over.
Basketball is America's game, invented right here, although by a Canadian; the game of the city that perfectly expresses the national need for big scores and the individual need of every player to have a chance to be a hero on every play.
But neither of them is a proper pastime, still the perfect epithet for this most unassuming and magical of games; unassuming because its object is so basic - to hit a ball with a stick; magical because of its roots that burrow so deeply into our culture and history.
It is a way to keep time. Pitchers and catchers is a far more certain sign of the coming spring than a rodent's shadow. Opening Day nudges us gently into six months during which the game revisits us for three or four hours nearly every day. The curtain on the final act, the Fall Classic, falls with the last leaves from trees buttoning up for the coming winter.
Think of all the times that a baseball game saved you. You can follow a baseball game almost anywhere. Anyone who's driven into a long summer's night knows the joy of finding a ballgame on a distant AM station and straining through the static to follow the narrative while the miles roll by.
You stop in a bar, and the ballgame's on, and when you head home, it stays with you on the radio until you can pick it up again. And if there's something else you want to watch at home, you can call up the pitch-by-pitch on your computer, tuning in just often enough to follow a favorite pitcher or the at-bats of your slugging hero.
Football and basketball demand your total attention, the play leaving no gaps in which to insert a thought or a conversation. Baseball is background music, a familiar cadence carrying you from one vital moment to the next. If you miss it, no problem: there's plenty of time to replay it, dissect it, cheer it, lament it.
And there's another game tomorrow. Unlike football, in which a loss lasts a week, if your team loses a baseball game, the pain evaporates with the morning dew. In no other sport do the words apply as they do in baseball: "We'll get 'em tomorrow."
The daily dose of hope is a tonic. Towards the end of his life, it kept my father alive for one more summer despite the best efforts of modern medicine.
He had grown up on the East Side of Cleveland, not far from League Park, where the Indians used to play their games. During his final year, when the surgeons were lopping off parts of his limbs and telling him he'd get out of the bed he never got out of, he told me about sneaking into the park or peering through cracks in the outfield fence to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and the other heroes of the day.
He didn't have either the time or the money to take us to many games when we were growing up, and I never knew how much he loved it until the end, when he spent the long days in a nursing home waiting for 7 o'clock and the Indians game on television. Cleveland had last won a World Series in 1948, when he was young and strong and fresh from service in the South Pacific. He kept hoping they'd win it again and he'd see it.
So he stayed alive for one more summer, the ballgames pulling him - and not a few others in the senior-citizen barracks that had become his home - from day to day, week to week, month to month.
The Indians didn't make the playoffs that year, but he stuck it out until the end, then stayed around for the joy of seeing the Yankees lose the World Series. A couple of weeks later, he died. I figure he knew he wasn't going to make it to spring training, so there wasn't any sense trying.
We were vastly different people who didn't agree on a lot of things, but it didn't matter. We had baseball to talk about. Sure, we talked football, too, but you couldn't keep that going long. Only baseball can consume whole days. I mean, he saw Babe Ruth play. Tell me about it, Dad. Tell me about it.
I didn't see the Babe, but I feel that I did, and not just because of the newsreel footage of a barrel-chested man running with mincing steps on spindly legs around the bases after another prodigious clout.
I know him as I know so many others I never saw because I've read about them. Nearly every great sports book I've read is about baseball and the men who played it. It's somewhat absurd how baseball fanatics are about the game's sacred numbers; no other sport is similarly obsessed. But it's also part of the game's charm, and it allows us to really care about people who were dead before our grandparents were born.
You know what makes baseball great? I don't have to describe it or say anything about it to conjure a thousand visions in your mind. All I have to do is say the Splendid Splinter, the Man, Hammerin' Hank, the Mick, Eck, the Rocket, Joe D., Rickey, Doc, Lefty, Boomer, Satch, Jackie Robinson, Newk, the Duke, the Say Hey Kid, the Candy Man, Pops, No-mah, Charlie Hustle, the Hawk, Knucksie, Whitey, Papi, the Babe, Nails, Junior.
It doesn't matter if you're 90 or 9, there's a name in there that you can see in the flesh just by hearing it. There's dirt and sweat and pine tar and line drives and double plays and home runs and stolen bases and big outs and bigger runs swirling through your mind's eye with those names. There's lazy summers and urgent Octobers in those names. There's beer and Coke and hot dogs and peanuts and emerald fields and box scores.
Is there anything like a baseball box score? Before the Internet, America woke up to a page of them in agate type in the back of the sports section and inhaled them with the morning's first cup of coffee. Today, you may check them on the Web before turning in, or at the office, when you fire up your computer and start pretending to work.
It's there for you always, and you can skip a game or even a week without feeling your life will end. Push the button on the dashboard and a familiar voice - a man you probably think you actually know because of all the stories he's told you over the years - picks it up in mid-count.
Three-and-two, go-ahead run at second, two outs. Here's the windup ..
