Pitchers and Catchers Report Right About Now

How I Became a Baseball Fan Again

I’m pretty sure that pitchers and catchers report to spring training right about now. I say pretty sure because I was able to sit right down and write this morning, without getting caught up with other online distractions first, like email, social networks, and increasingly checking to see how many people are reading this blog and checking out cjrcycl.es. Rather than check my facts on the spring training schedule at ESPN.com, I’m going to just roll with the facts that last I checked and go with the fact that pitchers and catchers report to spring training right about now!

This is the first year I’ve been excited about this. Last year was the first year I even thought about it, after hearing Gary Walker, morning host of jazz radio WBGO out of Newark, NJ, mention he was excited about it, as it’s kind of the unofficial start of the baseball season.

(BTW, if you like jazz and listen to WBGO on the radio or online, now’s a great time to support them during their winter membership drive. I started supporting them last year after too many years of just listening and it feels good to know I’m doing my small part to keep them broadcasting.)

Now back to pitchers and catchers. Gary’s announcement got me thinking about baseball again and I began to remember what a big baseball fan I was growing up and through high school. I think I lost interest in college. After college I moved to Washington, DC, which didn’t have their own baseball team until DC got the Nationals back a number of year ago.

I went to a few Orioles games in Baltimore, which was fun. I especially enjoyed Camden Yards as a park and also that it represented a return to stadiums built first for baseball and also within a city. This to me was a welcome change from the bland, multi-purpose stadiums that were built out in the suburbs in the ‘60's,’70's, and maybe ‘80's. I didn’t relate very closely to DC as a city or District or whatever it’s official classification is, so the Nationals weren’t really enough to get me excited about baseball again.

So it really was Gary’s announcement last year that got me thinking about baseball again. A paperback copy of “Shoeless Joe”, by W.P. Kinsella, survived my transition from real books to the Kindle versions. For those of you who may not know, that’s the book that the movie “Field of Dreams” was based on. I started reading it again, even though I’ve read it and seen the movie more times than I can remember. I started watching Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary series on Netflix on demand. I even signed up for MLB.com’s radio service, so I had the ability to listen to every game of the season.

I then slowly began to realize that I’m living in a city that still appreciates baseball and has two teams. Hearing people talk about it here and there, seeing it reported on the back page of the Daily News and New York post, going to Carmine’s Pizzeria on Graham Avenue, which, in addition to serving great pizza, is like a mini-shrine to the Yankees, passing the guys playing organized softball in the park, and seeing an active Little League program in action in the neighborhood all helped me to see that baseball wasn’t really dead. I think over the years, from college through to now, I had been under the impression that it was. I was really happy to be proven wrong and also discover at the same time that I’m a baseball fan again!