Memories make spring training games
by E.J. Montini, The Arizona Republic
Baseball is like the grass that it’s played on. In the spring, it’s perfect. There are no weeds or brown spots, no ragged clumps or patches worn to dirt by the rubbing and clawing of cleats. It hasn’t been dried out by the sun or pockmarked by overuse.
The season will take its toll. Whole patches, even whole fields, will be scraped up by the roots and replaced with sod grown on farms and rolled into place like carpet – an unnatural/natural toupee. Tarps will cover it. It may be spray-painted to look more green or cut into complex designs meant to be more beautiful than nature, but aren’t.
Then, in winter, it will go dormant and brittle, snapping into wispy toothpicks with each sneaker or boot or dog paw that lands on it. It will look dead. Gone. But it won’t be. The grass comes back. Baseball is like that.
During the course of every off-season, the owners, players, commercial sponsors, TV networks and sports media claw and poke at the game until everything beautiful about it is rubbed to dirt or reduced to ragged, rootless clumps. And baseball seems dead. Gone. But it isn’t. It comes back. And, luckily for us, it comes back to the Valley, where the dormant game blossoms again each spring.
Sports fans have lost their way. We’ve become obsessed with results, with wins and losses, with the size of contracts, the number of championships. We’ve forgotten that the best part of baseball doesn’t occur in the fall with the playoffs and the World Series.
The best part of baseball happens in spring.
It isn’t the runs, hits or errors that matter in a spring-training game. It isn’t the home runs or the strikeouts. The stolen bases. The double plays. It’s the memories.
Spring training is my son and me sitting in the 1990s in the grass behind the right-field wall at Scottsdale Stadium. I’m waiting for Barry Bonds to take the field so I can boo him – not for using steroids, which wasn’t yet that big a deal – but for having left the Pittsburgh Pirates.
My son and some other boys are leaning over the low wall behind the sunken outfield, and Bonds spots the Pirate hat on my boy’s head and says, “Hey, you’re not allowed to wear that in here.”
Bonds has an animated conversation with the kids, leading my son to run up to me afterward shouting, “Dad, dad, do you know who my favorite player is?”
Spring training is the day several years later when my father came for a visit. It is only a few months after my mother died, leaving him lost. Adrift.
We arrive early for a game.
At most of the local stadiums, fans who sit in the farthest seats from home plate don’t need binoculars. Few sections rise higher than an average flagpole. Before this game, I watch as my father walks down to the railing along the third-base line and reaches over to touch the grass. The grounds crew is hosing down the infield, and a slight breeze fills the air with the musty smell of wet dirt.
“I’ll bet the infielders here have never seen a bad hop,” my dad says.
For a few hours during that game, he isn’t an older man lost and alone on an ocean of grief. He is tethered to something solid, something that was around before he was born and would be there after he was gone. To baseball.
Spring training is a day in 2003 when I am standing outside a local ballpark with Joe Reaves, a great reporter and writer who now works for the Los Angeles Dodgers. We are waiting for a late-arriving friend when we spot a very thin, frail young man trying to steady himself against a fence outside the stadium. Near him is a tall, lovely blond woman pulling a small pack on wheels that holds bottles of liquid and what look like dozens of pill containers.
I find out later that their names are Eric and Lynne Holden and that Eric is a teacher and musician, the father of three young children. He is in his mid-30s and dying of cancer.
We talk baseball and hometowns. It turns out that we were born in the same part of western Pennsylvania. Holden has no particular connection to the teams playing at the spring-training game where I spotted him.
It was baseball that drew him there.
It was the idea of sitting in the sun on a spring afternoon, watching a few innings, not thinking about illness, not thinking about anything except the young pitcher trying to control his curveball, or the veteran who couldn’t yet find his swing.
He wasn’t worried about playoff possibilities or max contracts or blockbuster trades. He wondered instead if grass could really be that green, if the sky could be that blue, if the sound of a bat striking a ball was really that sharp.
Within a few weeks, Holden would be gone; but, for a few innings that spring day, he was just another fan in a stadium, in the moment, watching two teams for which he felt no particular allegiance play a game that – officially – did not count. But it did count.
And it still does.
