Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The Heralds of Spring

Teaser Tuesday went well last week and I’ll definitely do it again. The comments were very helpful. Thank you everyone (more comments are welcome). I’m hard charging into my WIP and have passed the 10,000 word mark. Only 70 grand to go! Today, I want to talk about my favorite sport, baseball. The new season is officially a week old. My favorite team, the Yankees (don’t hate the player, hate the game) is off to a mediocre start, thanks in large part to Chien-Ming Wang being absolutely dreadful in his first two starts.

NFL hall of famer, Howie Long, perfectly contrasted baseball and football. In his hall of fame induction speech he said that while baseball was America’s pastime, football was America’s passion. I agree with that. I’m passionate about football, but love baseball. Someone else described the distinction as football being the way life is while baseball is the way life should be. No matter how much the owners and players try to screw it up, and the media criticizes it, baseball is still a great game. A game to enjoy for the whole family, and my family surely does. My three-year-old son is getting into the game, my oldest nephew is on his high school varsity team, my other nephew is in little league, and I have two teenage nieces who are on softball teams.

Baseball players are famously known as “the boys of summer,” but for me they’re the "heralds of spring." They start their season at the best time of the year. Spring always has so much promise, so much hope. The days get longer and the weather starts to get warmer (unless you’re in NYC now with it being unseasonable cold most of March and this first half of April). Life just feels better at the start of spring. The baseball season is also full of promise and hope, especially this year in NYC with the two new stadiums. I have tickets for the May 1st game at the new Yankee Stadium and I can’t wait. I hope to get tickets for Citifield as well. Even though both teams have not started off great and the Yankees are missing a big part of their lineup (the head case, A-Rod), there’s much hope for the season.

The thing I cherish most about baseball is the nostalgia, both in the game and in your own experience. The game is a time machine where you can envision the players of the past playing the same game as today, and the players from today playing in the past, even with the whole steroid issue. The personal nostalgia is the memories I have, of my parents being big baseball fans (they still are), but my father being mainly a Met fan, and my mother being a die-hard Yankee fan. I was born in 1972, so I never got to see the original Yankee Stadium, but my mother did. She also got to see Mickey Mantle play. Her memories are my memories now. That’s the beauty of baseball.

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