Spring Training: It's Like Heaven Only Better

And, of course, there were those games in Baltimore, but I try to forget them as best I can.

As much as I loved watching summer baseball, I desired to experience it's prequel, it's birth, it's beginning.

I wanted to experience Spring Training.

Not just a game, or a series, mind you. I didn't want to be baseball's guest; I wanted to be its neighbor and its friend.

By 1985, however, it seemed that it would never happen, and that saddened me deeply.

I was living in St. Louis, surrounded and enveloped by a near deadly combination of mortgage and marriage and madness. My children kept me busy and my job kept me chained to a nine-to-five routine that never seemed to change. Most every summer night, though, Jack Buck and Mike Shannon would send 50,000 watts through my radio, breathing new life into my weary and worn out soul.

My only outlet, as it had been my entire life, was baseball.

It had always been that soft warm place that welcomed me after an especially harrowing day. It never threatened me for not paying my bills and it always appreciated and accepted my love and it never, never talked back, even when I deserved it.

I was in St. Louis during that magical year of 1985 when the two Missouri teams met in the World Series. Bush Stadium rocked with "Whitey Ball," Whitey Herzog's run-and-gun offense that featured solid pitching and seven players capable of stealing 30 or more bases.

The Cardinals, however, weren't really a baseball team.

They were a compilation of superhuman athletes who were so fast that even The Flash himself wouldn't have led the team in stolen bases. They were men who used their bats as a pool cues, deftly adding just the right amount of English so that the ball seemingly defied the laws of physics and always landed where intended.

Circuitous. Look it up in the dictionary and it you'll find as one of the definitions "The way the ball travelled when hit by the 1985 Cardinals."

And they did all this on plastic grass.

Bad, plastic grass.

I was saddened by my first view of the field at Busch Stadium. I entered through a portal on the first base side to find that the field wasn't green at all. A decade of abuse by both Cardinal teams and the hot Missouri sun left the first generation Astro-turf a color more white than green.

This wasn't baseball. Not really.

Men in double-knit uniforms so tight that you could see a pimple on their butts were springing across an asphalt blacktop covered with a 3/8" pad and a 1/4" plastic skin. Monsanto made the stuff in the same plant where they made their carpets, for crying out loud.

This couldn't be the same sport that once featured our chiseled heroes in baggy flannels playing on dew covered grass to the cheers of a still-innocent America.

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