A Line Drive, Hot Dogs--Our Winter of Discontent Ends

“There are only 21 days left until pitchers and catchers can report to spring training.”

The message fairly glowed on the computer screen Friday morning, furnished by a colleague who keeps a group of baseball fans in the office posted during the off-season. Because he dutifully sends out the message every day, the tendency is to take quick note of the continuing countdown and get on with the daily chores.

But on Friday, the message settled over my aching psyche like the balm of Gilead.

Twenty-one days and baseball will be back? Man, that sounds good.

This has become a winter of no small discontent.

Saddam. Ugh. Russian tanks in the Baltics.

Continuing drought in California.

A forecast of ongoing budget problems for Orange County.

Bummer, dude.

Who knows how much restorative power spring training can provide, but I can’t wait to find out. Where’s that old kit bag, and what’s the fastest way to the eastbound 10?

We all seek solace where we can. For the first time a few years ago, I sought it in Arizona where several major league clubs, including the Angels, go to get ready for the season.

In recent years, baseball has firmly re-established itself as America’s pastime, brushing aside a brief threat from football and somehow graduating into an even higher state of romanticized lore. That’s why “Field of Dreams” worked.

The more stressful society seems to get, the more reassuring the ghosts of Ruth, Gehrig and Cobb seem to be.

You can summon all the great ghosts at spring training. The games are played by the rules but the scores are almost incidental, so you can sit in the stands and daydream, conjuring up a picture of a young Willie Mays trying to make the team for the first time, or an aging veteran trying to make the team for the last time.

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the game the way it used to be played--small stadiums with almost all of the fans within shouting distance of the players; the players themselves walking idly alongside the stands and, occasionally, coming up into the stands to see a friend or relative; a 12-year-old boy trying to persuade his favorite player to lean over the railing and sign an autograph.

The fans know their roles. Women in sun dresses and straw bonnets sit next to bare-chested men in cutoffs, alternately watching the game or lazing in the reverie of the afternoon. But inevitably, the reverie will be interrupted by some leather-lunged baseball expert reacting to a rookie’s on-field miscue with a cry of: “Enjoy it while you can, ya bum; you’ll be back in Des Moines by June!”

And unlike the regular season, no one gets mad at the loudmouth, for they know that such trashing of the rooks has a hallowed place in the annals of spring training.

Two years ago in Phoenix, I was watching a game between the Giants and the Indians. The man next to me, 50ish and wearing an Indians’ baseball cap, hadn’t said a word for the first five innings of the game, and neither had I, when he suddenly said almost under his breath as if he were passing along a military secret: “I’m going down to Tucson tomorrow to see the Tribe.”

That set us off on a conversation about the Tribe’s chances for the upcoming season, which rookies looked good, which veterans were over the hill and which trades shoulda or coulda been made. We paid scant attention to the rest of the game, yet had a wonderful afternoon.

Yes, there is a simpleness to spring training that you won’t duplicate once the regular season starts. You won’t again find the tickets that cheap, the hot dogs that tasty, nor the world farther away.

On Friday, I phoned Compadre Stadium in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, where the Milwaukee Brewers play their spring home games. It’s a great place to watch a game, because you can sit on a grassy knoll outside the park and still see the game while catching some rays. I wanted to know if the Dancing Grannies of Sun Lakes--a senior citizens group--would be performing between innings again this year, as they had the last time I was there.

“The Dancing Grannies will definitely be here,” the man said.

Say no more.

All by themselves, the Dancing Grannies of Sun Lakes won’t make the world go away. But add the sound of bat on ball, the sight of pitchers running around the warning track in the middle of a game, and big-leaguers chatting with the fans on a hot desert day, and you can temporarily forget what ails you in the real world.

Let’s see, if it was 21 days on Friday, that means that now there are only 19. . . .

Nineteen and counting, and maybe then we can begin climbing out of this already too-long, too-dark winter.