This is it. Today is the day. It's been a long, brutal five-and-a-half months, but it's finally here. Today, Thursday Feb. 15, is the biggest sports moment of the young year. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to their training complexes in Florida and Arizona, marking the beginning of Major League Baseball's illustrious Spring Training. Yes.
I know what you're saying. "What about the Super Bowl? Isn't that the biggest sports moment of the year?" No. The Super Bowl is just a glorified Regular Bowl, if not an outright Inferior Bowl. And it's the same every year! Just some dudes with identical enormous, shiny heads. SNORE! Come on, add some land mines for a change.
"How about the NBA?" Pass. "Doesn't the NHL do important things in the winter?" Absolutely not, and that's regardless of whether or not I'm interested. In fact, I'm not even convinced the NHL exists. It's just a ghostly apparition, fueled by a collective desire for a sport white people are best at. Go on, check the Urban Legends Reference Page, http://www.snopes.com. "There exists a National Hockey League: False." See? It's totally there.
All these things, real or imagined, are but a pathetic stopgap between end of the old season and the beginning of the new for the One True Sport: baseball. It's our National Pastime. Its history is tied inextricably (in big, hot pretzel knots with smattering of Storied Tradition-brand mustard) to the history of America itself. And it combines all my personal favorite aspects of sport, namely sitting, looking, tallying, evaluating and yelling incomprehensible messages of encouragement. Truly a robust test of brutish masculinity.
It is the only sport where beer-drinking bar brawlers can succeed on the field of play alongside midgets and the elderly, both employed as publicity stunts.
But really, I love baseball. Its history is as unique as it is fascinating, and to study it is to study a microcosm of the popular American consciousness. An interesting story: in baseball's earliest days in the late 18th-early 19th centuries, when a "ball club" was literally that -- a gentlemen's club where the quantity of women at the post-game dinner party was just as newsworthy as the game itself --- a rule stated a player could catch a ball on a single bounce for an out, called the Bound Rule. But many fans were in favor of a shift to the Fly Rule, mandating a catch in the air. The arguments got intense. Those in favor of the Fly Rule wrote op-eds that had little to do with the game of baseball, instead opting to wax philosophically about the concept of manliness. Catching the ball on a hop was mere boys' play, while grabbing it on the fly was men's work. A writer went as far as describing a bounced ball with masturbatory imagery -- spilling its energy on the ground -- while the manly way is taking the full force of the ball in the glove. How cool is that?
I can come up with plenty of examples of important national events being represented in the MLB. Desegregation, westward expansion and free market capitalism all have their parallels (Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn-L.A. Dodgers and free agency). Even today's steroid debate resounds of the lost innocence of what we've come to value as a kid's game, a game of idealism where anything can happen until the last out is recorded. Hell, the phrase "level playing field" probably came from baseball, just like so many idioms that have worked their way into our vernacular.
There's no way people would have the same reaction to a steroid scandal in football. Football players are 300-pound man-tree-tank-bears that bear little resemblance to mainstream America. But baseball (in theory) is the great equalizer. We can identify with baseball players because anyone with the capacity to connect a round bat with a round ball has a shot.
This season's going to be a good one. When Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron's home-run record, a national dialogue will emerge the likes of which no other sport can produce, where sports journalists will bloviate about the sanctity of record books. But I don't care about their opinions (mostly because they're 99 percent asinine). I care that there's a debate, that baseball more than 200 years after it first emerged on the scene is still relevant to what our culture thinks about itself. Even in the age of $100 million contracts, the game can still reflect our values.
And baseball has even more still to offer. What better way is there to learn about false hope? Macho posturing over events you had nothing to do with? Knowing what famous people should have done? I'm ready to love, then hate, then love my New York Mets again. So move over, southern hemisphere golf tournaments and hockey ghosts. It's baseball season.
