Another football season has been packed away. Other than the NFL draft and spring practice for the college teams, we will have to wait another six months for another meaningful event.
March Madness is another month away, and the NBA playoffs two months off.
To my fellow sports fans who find this a bit distressing, allow me to comfort you with a simple time-honored phrase.
“Pitchers and catchers report.”
Just 13 days from today, Major League Baseball begins its annual pilgrimage to familiar ports of hope all over central and south Florida and Arizona. The mere mention of places otherwise obscure to most of America, except for Snowbirds -- places like Vero Beach, Winter Haven and Port St. Lucie -- has an almost magical sound to those of us with a passion for America’s original pastime.
Sure, the actual spring training games are nearly four weeks away. And for the first couple of weeks, the games are played with about as much intensity as celebrity softball. Pitchers are just trying to build up arm strength and velocity. Hitters are just trying to rediscover their swings without pulling an oblique muscle.
So the first couple of weeks of spring training are little more than players trying to get a decent workout in before heading to the golf course -- and avoiding sunburn.
As Haray Caray observed, “It’s the fans that need spring training. You gotta get ’em interested. Wake ’em up and let ’em know that their season is coming, the good times are gonna roll.”
That’s why spring training holds a certain magical aura unlike anything else in sport. Maybe that’s because many of us still hold a romantic passion for baseball. Roges Hornsby began his Hall of Fame career with the St. Louis Cardinals nearly a century ago and has been dead for almost 50 years. But his quote on surviving winter is timeless.
“People ask me what I do in the winter when there’s no baseball,” Hornsby said. “I‘ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
Something else unique about spring training. Hope and worry seem inversely relevant to our teams’ realistic potential. Growing up here in the ’70s, I clinged to the naive but sincere belief that the Braves’ offseason moves -- whether it was signing Andy Messersmith or trading Dusty Baker to the Dodgers for Jimmy Wynn and half of their farm system -- surely would lead to that glorious and grandiose goal of finishing .500. Every spring brought a new rising star. Pat Rockett. Preston Hannah. Tommy Boggs.
But every season brought the game brutal reality -- 94 losses in 1975, 92 losses in ’76, 101 losses in ’77, 93 losses in ’78, 94 losses in ’79.
Times, as it has been well-documented, have changed. Losing seasons are scarce -- just two since 1990. Last September’s Wall Street-like crash led to an offseason of angst for the fans, especially as the Braves made not a single move to address their sporadic hitting while everyone else in the National League East took bold steps to improve.
The good news is that the Braves didn’t panic. Frank Wren, the Braves’ general manager, has done a remarkable job of restocking the roster with young talent without sacrificing the present. Their stockpile of pitchers 26 years old and younger is the envy of GM’s from Miami to Seattle. Wren refused to deal from a position of weakness.
So, yeah, it would be nice to have another right-handed bat or two in the lineup. Failing to shore up this weakness may turn out to be their undoing.
For those of you too young to remember the days of Eddie Haas and Russ Nixon, one day I’ll tell you the story of Ozzie Virgil. But not now.
For now, let us keep our focus on those four most magical words.
Pitchers and catchers report.
-- Guerry Clegg is an independent correspondent. Contact him at sports@ledger-enquirer.com
