February. Fifty-degree weather. Rain.
Why not start the baseball season in the middle of the winter?
It is a funny thing that the NCAA decided to start the collegiate season so early. Snow is still on the ground in much of the Northeast and Midwest, and yet the Ducks are putting on their stirrups for the start of games on Friday. A sport that brings to mind visions of sunny weather and green grass instead will get its first games played under steel gray skies and rain.
Excuse me if this sounds like griping, because it’s not. It is a joyous occasion when baseball teams around the country start playing again. It’s just ironic that winter marks the start of the season when all my memories of the sport are from the summer.
When I get to thinking about why I love the game of baseball, it takes me back to July in Eastern Washington and Central Idaho. Both my mom’s and dad’s parents lived there, with my Grandma and Grandpa Fode living on a farm near the town of Lind, Wash. My Grandma and Grandpa Schorzman also lived in Lind when I was born, but for most of my childhood they lived in Cambridge, Idaho, not that far from Hells Canyon and the Snake River. Every summer after little league was done for the year, my mom would drive my brother Byron and me to my grandparents in Lind and we would spend the majority of the next three months on the farm.
My Grandpa Fode grew wheat, and although he’s been retired for as long as I can remember, he still leased out the acreage to someone who worked the fields. Sometimes he would take my brother and me out into the fields in his old Chevrolet pickup, the uneven ground bouncing us about the cab. I loved going there every summer because of the huge amount of open space. We would play baseball for hours outside the house, and Grandpa Fode built us a makeshift backstop to keep us from losing too many balls. Once he did that, there was no stopping us. Every free moment we had was spent out on our makeshift baseball diamond, with the corner of the car patio being first base, an old piece of metal being second base and a wood block being third. With the blazing summer heat bearing down, we re-enacted game after game, pretending to be MLB stars. We played numerous World Series games and kept records of our exploits. We would even get in brawls.
Then in the evenings, we would sit around the living room and watch the Mariners play on TV. We must have watched more than 100 games every summer from the time I was 6 to the time I was 15.
It was fun.
I often think of these summers spent playing baseball when I need a moment of perspective. Byron and I didn’t have a care in the world besides who was going to bat first. It’s something I’ve tried vainly to recapture, but with the passing years, responsibilities have begun to mount and I’m within reach of graduating. The innocence of playing a game because it is fun has been lost.
I was back in Lind this November for Thanksgiving, and I took a moment to go out to where a lot of my fondest memories of baseball occurred. The backstop (just two posts put in the ground with tin roofing covering them) was shorter and smaller than I remembered. The metal grill we used as home plate still lay in the dirt, with the ruts from where we stood batting still clearly evident. I walked out to the “mound” and it was closer than I remembered. Things had obviously changed; I was bigger and older, but my recollections still made me smile.
Memories like these are why I think so many people love baseball. It’s a sport many little kids have played, and as they grow older, the love for the game does too. Baseball, unlike any other sport, is about the past. Players breaking records of past greats pay homage to them, and in the United States, the history of baseball is more widely known than football, basketball or soccer. Everyone knows who Babe Ruth is, and he played 80 years ago.
I’m excited for the 2010 Oregon Duck baseball season for many reasons. But mostly it’s drawn from anticipation of another summer watching baseball games and trying to capture the feeling I had as an 11-year-old, swinging a bat too big for me, playing the game I love.
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