Despite concerns about Covid, and masking, and shots, and the economy, baseball is back to lend a much-needed familiar, and something different.
Port Charlotte, FL – This won’t be ‘woke’. So brace yourself.
But there’s never been something more anticipated, and more-needed than this 2022 opening weekend for NCAA baseball here in Port Charlotte, Florida. It’s was 82 degrees Friday, some white, puffy clouds…and just good.
It’s good for the 25 or so Ohio State baseball players who have endured two years of on-and-off baseball, no baseball, or conditional baseball last year when they only played Big Ten teams and two-thirds of their normal schedule.
The Heath Murray Agency sponsors the Buckeyes on Press Pros.
Good for Greg Beals and his staff because 2022 promises that all-important development opportunity to assess their recruiting efforts over the last three seasons. I can imagine…it’s maddening not to know whether your instincts were right.
It’s good for those who just love baseball, and the tincture of being outside, sunshine, and warm breezes…the therapeutic sounds of the crack of the bat and baseballs smacking the glove. Worries over Covid are nowhere to be seen around the beautiful Centennial Park complex here in Port Charlotte. The concerns are about hitting with runners on base, turning double plays, and earned run averages.
The people who congregated Friday to watch the Buckeyes and Marshall play, from Ohio and West Virginia, were perfectly normal – normal like we remember it – no mention of the border, Covid 20, 21, and 22, or the economy. The notable exception was $3.39 gas. That last time anyone was here it was $2.19.
Nothing is ever really the same, of course. Life changes. But the experience of all this does conjure memories of growing up along the Ohio River, and wishing – hoping – for those warm February days. Fifth graders then, we’d put on our Little League cleats and play baseball outside during recess on a muddy playground, pretending to be Johnny Temple, Roy McMillan, and Wally Post. And what a mess, tracking in all that mud when we had to go back inside!
Every year the local TV station in Huntington would run the old Ray Milland movie It Happens Every Spring, about a college chemistry professor who accidentally invented a liquid in his lab that when applied to a baseball made the ball avoid any contact with wood. It eventually led to him signing a contract to play for a fictitious major league team from St. Louis and the rest of it…well, I don’t want to ruin the ending.
It was corny, but I loved that movie with Milland and his co-star, a very young Jean Simmons. At the time of its release in 1942 the film was called on to be banned because it condoned cheating, the least of its issues if it were made today. Here’s the trailer, and you can watch it full-length on YouTube.
As a kid I always watched, always alert for the ads – when it would be playing on the old NBC Saturday Night at The Movies show. It had nothing to do with reality, of course. It was just fun. Baseball…was fun back then. Life was fun!
As it is this weekend, like it hasn’t been recently…a sense of missing, longing, from players and fans who’ve waited, and wasted, through Covid and Omicron, and the constant contradiction…just to have the chance to experience what Vernon Simpson discovered with his test tube tinkering.
This is real, and while you’re not allowed to smoke at public venues in Florida, I swear someone fired up a Dutch Masters yesterday, its unmistakable aroma wafting through the air of an ocean breeze. They grill hot dogs and burgers on a big Weber at the concession stand. And there’s coolers and red cups, a fond memory of Crosley Field days and when vendors barked, “I got ‘dogs and Burgers” – the liquid kind, not Angus beef.
This is so good…so necessary. So taken for granted.
If hope springs eternal, it’s a reminder of the better virtues of the human spirit and the lost dreams of youth. Nothing – not failing third grade, being sick, or being in trouble with Dad – mattered once winter weather broke and there were yards to be mowed, summer plans to be made…and there was baseball.
It happens every spring.
Plan now for High School spring training…or NCAA early tournament action on the sun coast of Florida.