It's Time To Get Behind The Mule

I guess this is really it, huh?

My God, it doesn’t seem possible.

One of my problems with baseball of late is that everything that could conceivably be said about the game in its past and present incarnations has already been said. I feel like I’ve said plenty myself, and the older I get the more I’m certain that I spend much of my time repeating myself.

But what the hell, I guess I’m back to repeat myself some more.

I think it was Tom Boswell –or maybe it was Tom Bosley, or possibly even James Boswell– who once said “Time begins on opening day.”

That’s utter hogwash, of course. For anybody who’s really helplessly conscripted to baseball, time ends on opening day. From here on out, right up until winter starts tearing down the autumn foliage (which generally and cruelly coincides with the precise moment when the last out is made in the last World Series game), my days are pretty much shot to shit.

I spent the winter trying my best not to even think about baseball (this was a first, at least since those lost adolescent years when I was too busy snorking into a bong to pay proper attention to hygiene, let alone professional sports). I was tired of steroids, whose presence in Major League clubhouses over the last decade was apparent to anyone with even compromised eyesight and half a brain. I was disgusted when the baseball establishment ignored this obvious reality as records were being obliterated and power numbers were going through the roof.

We all knew what was going on, of course, and why Bud Selig and the baseball establishment was pretending nothing was going on. Nobody wanted to acknowledge the presence of steroids and the effect they were having on the game for the obvious reason that baseball needed all those fireworks and all the attention they brought.

Because without Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds et al, Major League Baseball would have been in big, big trouble, and the Pooh-Bahs might have had to acknowledge the serious economic problems they were facing. Without all those home runs and all the money and attention they brought to the game, I’d have to imagine that an awful lot of those new stadiums –many of which will spend much of the coming season half empty– would never have gotten built.

I’m still sick to death of steroids and inflated offensive statistics and the ever escalating economic absurdities of the sport, but I’ve realized in the last few months that I still love baseball. I can’t help myself. Kirby Puckett died and I was shattered, but I was also reminded of how much pleasure –personal and, more importantly, communal pleasure– and real joy baseball has given me over the years. The game is hard-wired in my brain, and the moment the snow started disappearing from the city parks and the baseball fields –the baseball diamonds— started to emerge, I realized I was getting antsy.

One night a few weeks ago, without even quite realizing what I was doing, I found myself in the bookstore, standing in the checkout line with a pile of baseball annuals in my arms. I started picking up the newspaper again, and scanning the notes from the spring training camps.

Yesterday, as I read through the baseball previews in the Star Tribune and the New York Times, I recognized that I was genuinely excited. My hiatus from the game, which stretched back to sometime around last year’s all-star break, was good for me, but it’s time for me to take baseball back, to bring it back into my life.

I’m ready for another season to begin, ready for the old comfortable routines of box scores and evenings at the ballpark and Baseball Tonight, for road trips and radio broadcasts. And, as always, I’m fully prepared –well, perhaps not fully prepared– for the usual surprises and disappointments, and am holding out hope for more of the former than the latter.

I will also say this, as prelude to a whole bunch of other crazy and contradictory stuff I’ll eventually get around to saying: I think the Twins are going to be a pretty damn good baseball team. That might be wishful thinking, but there haven’t been a whole lot of years where I’ve even been willing to indulge in that sort of wishful thinking on opening day.

And from a purely personal standpoint, that’s as good a way as any to kick off another baseball season.