Season Opens on Time (We Wish)

This is the season of our soul’s renewal. This is the time when expectation, like the sun, rises a little higher as each new day marks the hurtling of winter into spring with delicious inevitability toward Opening Day.

Baseball: No other game whispers so sweetly of the spirit’s secret yearnings. Its rhythms are those of the seasons: Hope in springtime, industry through the summer, bountiful harvest or brittle failure in the fall. Thus it was in that gentle, rural America imagined in our common memory, a half-invented Eden, a garden of innocent promise. Baseball is an annual reminder that--to turn Robert Frost’s line on its head--we Americans were the land before the land was ours.

Then, of course, there is the game itself. We do not call contests between baseball teams “matches,” but games. (And when we refer to baseball, we do not call it a “sport,” but the national pastime.) In it, we approach the infinite on our own terms: Theoretically every baseball game could go on indefinitely. The field itself is a green and open place, a memorial to that time when such things were not a luxury.

Baseball is as we would like to be, and imagine we once were. For that reason, we are uniquely forgiving of those who betray it. No one would speak of Joe Jackson and Benedict Arnold in the same breath. And nobody laughed at Pete Rose’s trouble. When we think of Shoeless Joe and Charlie Hustle, we are sadly puzzled and hopeful of their redemption somewhere in time.

We might even have forgiven the owners and the players’ association--if they had not let their quarrel over money stand between the rest of us and the promise of Opening Day. But some things are unforgivable--and there’s not much time left for redemption.