We are in the middle of Sports Lent: that time of sober reflection between the end of the Super Bowl and the beginning of March Madness. The NBA playoffs and the Stanley Cup are still well over the horizon, barely visible through the gloom of winter where I live. There’s only one thing that keeps me going through the dog days of winter: the day pitchers and catchers report for spring training.
This year, for most major league teams, P&C Day is February 19. For me, it’s a better harbinger of spring than any robin or daffodil. When pitchers and catchers report to their ballclubs in Florida or Arizona, there is a fundamental shift in the psyche of the seasons: you know you have made it through the storms of another winter and that the snow will melt, the redbud and dogwood will bloom, and that sound you love—crack of ash on horsehide—will again be heard in the land.
I admit there are other sounds and signs of Sports Spring: the blooming azaleas around Amen Corner at Augusta National and the accompanying CBS soundtrack spring (so to speak) to mind. But nothing compares to the day pitchers and catchers first saunter onto the field to begin again their annual quest for the Holy Grail of baseball: a World Series Championship. That old saw—wait ‘til next year—becomes a promise renewed; hope is reborn.
When I was a boy living in cold, gloomy Pittsburgh, my family would pack up the car in mid-March and head south. We wound our way down through Virginia and the Carolinas, across Georgia, then on down the west coast of Florida to where the Pirates trained in Fort Myers. It was a long trip made all the longer by an uncle who snored in the car and by a boy’s itchy anticipation of seeing his heroes again. Not just seeing them; getting close enough to them to get a glance or an autograph, maybe even a foul ball—holiest of holies—during batting practice. There was even the day that will live forever in my mind when I was invited down into the dugout and allowed to assist the batboy for an inning or two. Wilmer ‘Vinegar Bend’ Mizell even spoke to me that day but I was so starstruck that whatever he said to me went in one ear and right out the other and I just gaped at him like a fool. It took me another whole day to return to earth.
Well, those were the proverbial days. The Pirates now train in Bradenton and I don’t get a spring break anymore. The uncle who snored is long gone. But on the day pitchers and catchers report, I’m a boy again, magically transported south, looking for alligators in the roadside canals, dreaming of the arc of a baseball across a cloudless sky under the Florida sun.
After careers in both international development (Special Olympics) and secondary education (Landon School), Jamie Kirkpatrick bought a home on the Eastern Shore in 2011. Now he’s a happily married freelance writer and photographer who plays golf and the bagpipes with equal facility. Jamie’s writing and photography have appeared in The Baltimore Sun and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently at work on a new book called “Musing Right Along.
John Hudson says
Wow Jamie, Reading your article made me feel as though spring is near. Wonderful story, thank you. John
Martha Holland says
As a transplant from Massachusetts to Chestertown, I am, of course, a Red Sox fan, dating from 1966 when they lost 90 games and finished 26 games behind the first place Orioles. Things got better after that. I happen to know that the Ref Sox truck departed from Fenway Park last Wednesday, loaded with equipment for Spring Training bound for Ft Myers. This is a very important milestone as it marks the preliminary to Pitchers and Catchers Report , and indeed starts the season When Anything is Possible and last year’s basement dwelling team might just have a chance to go to the World Series.
Mr. Kirkpatrick’s lyrical evocation of spring training and its meaning to all true baseball fans was a welcome reminder of good times to come.Play Ball!!
As an afterthought, my most memorable Spring Training was in 1946 when I was a freshman at Balboa High School in the Canal Zone because my father was stationed there in the military. The New York Yankees, freshly restocked with players returning from military service chose the Balboa High School baseball field for their Spring Training and I spent every lunch hour pressed to the fence watching and collecting autographs, including the great Joe DiMaggio.
Michael Brunner says
Great story Martha. There are plenty of us from the Boston area here in Kent County. You will recognize us by the big red B on our caps, or by the way we correctly pronounce your name.