A friend who knows of my passion for baseball emailed me the morning of February 15th from New York. The message was one of cheer, and stated “It’s going to be a great day. The birds are singing, the temperature is going up to 50 degrees, and pitchers and catchers report for spring training.”
Actually, 50 degrees is quite unusual for New York at this time of year, and the reporting date might still be a couple of days away. But, you get the idea that inspired the kind thought. Spring is on the wing, and with it, a sense of renewal.
Indeed, the message set me to thinking about baseball as the arrival of spring training always does, and invoked memories of things past. When baseball arrives with spring training, the slate is clean, as it were: after all, it is the “next year” that fans have been waiting for.
The link between the arrival of spring and baseball was marvelously expressed in the words of Bart Giamatti, the late Commissioner of Baseball. “It breaks your heart,“ he wrote. “It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again and it blossoms in summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
Ever since professional baseball started, the ritual of spring training has been with us. With the exception of a rare work stoppage, spring training has proceeded on. During World War II, when travel was curtailed, it was situated in northern climates. The Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, and New York Yankees of that era spent their springs between 1943 and 1945 at such hot spots as Asbury Park, NJ, Atlantic City, NJ, Bear Mountain, NY, and Lakewood, NJ.
Hardly anybody was seen walking on the boardwalk in Atlantic City during spring training in 1944 as casinos had yet to arrive, and I vividly recall newspaper photos of New York players working out in snowshoes.
Spring training has also provided an opportunity for major league teams to test new venues, i.e., travels to points in the sunny Caribbean, and of course, in later times, flights to Japan. Trips that the Brooklyn Dodgers made outside of the South in the 1940s are believed by many to have been partially because of Branch Rickey’s desire to protect Jackie Robinson from abuse and segregation.
How much of a hold baseball has on America - and how intertwined the game is with spring - was evident in a 1949 movie, “It Happens Every Spring.” Its cast included Ray Milland, Jean Peters, and Paul Douglas, and it was an entertaining story of a chemistry professor who accidentally discovers a substance that enables a baseball to do strange things. In fact, for a brief time he sets major league baseball agog before it all catches up with him.
It is possible to muse as to whether the “trick” ball and its demise in the 1949 movie proves that all things that enhance performance will eventually be exposed – much as steroid use and abuse these days.
“It Happens Every Spring” received an Academy Award nomination as “Best Motion Picture Story,” which is perhaps as it should be, considering again the link with our national pastime. After all, as the noted historian Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”
» Sam Person is a retired university professor of accounting who occassionally writes on baseball.
Also by Sam Person
» Reflections on Don Mattingly: It Wasn't Just The Stats
» Yankee Stadium: July 21, 2002
» Pete Gray Dies
» Memories of Jackie Robinson
» The Search For Dean Chance
» Baseball Returns to Brooklyn, New York: You Can't Go Home Again
» On The John Rocker Trade
» DiMaggio for Williams: The Trade That Never Happened
» My Favorite Events at Each Position
» Some More Jewish Baseball Players
» My Brother’s Baseball Cards
» Strange Endings to Baseball Careers
» The Pitching Change
» More submissions
Copyright © 2005 by Sam Person. Posted February 16, 2005.
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