Spring Training: It's Like Heaven Only Better

Over the next month or two, stories about spring training will sprout up across the nation like grass on a freshly manicured Florida diamond.

Professional  writers  like Jayson Stark and Bill Gammons, as well as amateur bloggers and writers like me will begin to pen stories about the true meaning of spring training.

With eloquence, terms like "spring cathedrals" and "memories of my youth" will begin to dot the landscape of baseball blogs and magazines of every make and manner. Craftily worded metaphors will connect baseball to all things right and righteous.

Concepts like patriotism and a strong work ethic will flap in the breeze of their pleasant prose. Word-pictures will tell the stories of both the grizzled veteran sweating off his winter fat as well as the chiseled youngster with an ego as vast and as deep as his untapped potential.

We will read these stories and they will make us smile, because they will reflect memories of our childhood, a kind of "Field of Dreams" flashback but with real players and real fields and embedded dreams from our youth.

And like in the movie, the promise of "If you build it, he will come" still rings true.

For they built it. And I went.

I left Washington D.C. a half-decade after my beloved Senators did. Washington just didn't seem the same after RFK went dark during the city's hot, humid nights. True, George Allen and his Redskins electrified the city during those years, but their success made the summer silence all the more deafening.

I lived a few years in Denver and watched The Denver Bears play at Mile High Stadium. One night, their second baseman, 35 and old for the American Association, was given an award at home plate. He had just graduated from law school. When the master of ceremonies asked the player what was next on his horizon, he replied that he'd like to manage in the big leagues one day.

His name was Tony LaRussa.

I joined the Air Force in the late 1970's and spent my first tour-of-duty in Japan, and learned that baseball was indeed a universal language. I saw Sadaharu Oh drive a ball deep over the right field fence at Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo and was amazed that his stance, and his uniform, mirrored that of Mel Ott and the New York Giants from decades long forgotten.

In the early 1980's, I saw Carl Yaztremksi play at Fenway Park, Carlton Fisk squat behind the plate at Comisky Park, and watched a woeful Mariners' team draw but a handful of fans to the Kingdome that was as cavernous as it was ugly. Kirk Gibson impressed me as he roamed the outfield at Tiger Stadium, covering the same turf that Al Kaline once called home.

While visiting my aunt in Birmingham, I had the chance to take in a game or two at historic Rickwood Field, where I saw a young outfielder slam without question the longest home run I have ever seen in person.

Reggie Jackson hit a lot of those, didn't he?

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