I love baseball. If you read any sports writing, you’ve probably read articles about the positive aspects baseball brings to the world. They describe how the sights, sounds and smells of lazy Sunday afternoons at the ballpark can be heaven on Earth. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer George Will and others often philosophize how baseball is symbolic of life.
It’s going to be hard, but I’ll try to not do that.
On Saturday, I went with two fellow members of the Emerald sports staff to an Oregon State baseball game in Corvallis. The Beavers were playing Washington, and it was a perfect day for baseball.
As a student at Oregon, an impartial journalist and a citizen of a state more than 3,000 miles away from Seattle or Corvallis, I was indifferent about the outcome of the game. But I found myself cheering.
I wasn’t cheering for Washington’s Michael Done, who hit two, two-run home runs to right and finished the game with four RBI, or the Beavers’ shortstop Will Hudson, who made a few plays on grounders reminiscent of Omar and Nomar.
I was cheering for baseball. Cheering for stolen bases, big-breaking curveballs, diving stops and key hits. Cheering for hot dogs, high heat and helmets. Cheering for toeing the rubber, crossing the plate, soaking up the sun and spinning the deuce.
The smell of fresh-cut grass filled the … sorry, I promised I wouldn’t go into detail about the pleasing aesthetics of the game of baseball, but it isn’t as easy as taking candy from a baby.
Oregon students do have softball to watch at Howe Field – which I gained a new-found respect for by covering the Ducks this spring – but there is just something special about having 90-foot basepaths and a mound 60 feet, 6 inches from the plate.
Many of the other teams in the Pacific-10 Conference are thriving in softball and baseball. Arizona, Arizona State, California and UCLA all have their softball teams advancing as one of the eight teams in the Women’s College World Series, while their baseball teams are among the best in the country.
Soon Oregon will institute a new women’s team as a varsity sport, which is a step in the right direction to comply with Title IX regulations. But the law is vague in its description of what a school must do in order to comply. It says that an institution must show “a continuing practice” to accommodate the underrepresented sex. The University should do all it can to live up to Title
IX regulations, but I can’t see anything catastrophic coming from bringing baseball back to Eugene.
Bring another women’s sport into the varsity ranks, but the University, its fans and future students need baseball, which has been sorely missed since it was cut in 1981.
I understand that this is “Tracktown, USA,” but a new baseball field wouldn’t take any glory away from historic Hayward. Oregon needs to bring baseball back so fans won’t have to travel to Corvallis to take in their fix of collegiate baseball and sweet smelling leather, chatter of teammates and the crack of the bat – which, unfortunately, has been replaced by the ping of metal, but we’ll leave that issue for another column.
E-mail sports reporter Chris Cabot at [email protected]
Baseball deserves second run in Oregon
Daily Emerald
May 20, 2002
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