The Best Way to Welcome the Start of Spring

There’s something about spring, which officially begins today, that excites me. It’s knowing the cold, stormy weather is about gone-- enough of the rain already--and it’s time to go outside and play. It’s time for baseball.

I can think of nothing better to do on a warm day than throwing a baseball around in a neighborhood park.

Max Gomez shares the sentiment. At the start of the last few springs, Max rounded up son Jason for park outings to play catch and swing the bat. The sessions typically last into the fall, when football becomes king. “Dad’s curveball dies in October,” 8-year-old Jason laughs.

Father and son love the warm weather and baseball.

So it was that I met them at, of all places, Tommy Lasorda Park in the Echo Park district of L.A. for the start of their annual worship of the game. “This is the best,” Jason beamed as his dad hurled a ball high into the air. “I got it, Dad, I got it!”

The 8-year-old struggled with the bright sky to make the catch. But when he did, his father thundered his approval. “Great job!” Gomez yelled.

*

Watching them for more than two hours at Lasorda Park the other morning, I couldn’t figure who was having more fun: the father who teased his son with sky-high tosses--telling the son that the ball would never come down--or the son who kept asking challenging questions.

“Hey Dad, you think John Travolta is cool?” Jason wondered as he raced deep into center field to catch a fly. “Why won’t you let me see ‘Pulp Fiction’?”

“Forget it, kid, you’re too young,” Gomez said. “Keep your eye on the ball.”

“C’mon, you think I’ll freak out if I see it,” Jason teased.

Gomez ignored the pleading youngster. “You’ll freak out at this fly ball,” he called out, hurling the Spaulding into the blue.

Jason didn’t make the catch but smartly threw the ball back to his father on a single bounce after chasing it down.

“Nice throw,” Gomez yelled.

Borrowing a Travolta line from the flick, Jason cautioned, “That’s a bold statement.”

There’s no limit to the topics of discussion during these celebrations of the national pastime. Name the subject and they’ve talked about it. Girls, the baseball strike, the local economy, the recent rains.

Eventually the conversation turns to race.

Gomez, the son of a bricklayer who came to L.A. from Sonora, Mexico, in the early 1950s, doesn’t try to shield Jason from L.A.’s racially tense realities. The 8-year-old listened intently as his father tried to explain, at one point, why graffiti vandals are so unpopular.

“Are Mexicans the only ones who are doing the graffiti?” the boy innocently asked.

“No, we are not!” the father adamantly replied.

“Well, the kids at school call me a tagger because, I guess, I’m Mexican,” Jason volunteered after a few moments of awkward silence. “I don’t think that’s right.”

Gomez said much the same thing to his father when they used to toss the ball around at Belvedere Park in East L.A. “Teachers used to call me a cholo , and I used to talk back because I said I wasn’t a gang member,” he remembered. “My father used to say, ‘Don’t let them call you bad names. If you get mad at them and start calling them names, it will confirm their stupid notions about you.’

“That and playing catch were about the best things my father taught me.”

Jason listened patiently to his father until he got to ask a race question of his choosing.

“Dad, race you to the right-field foul line!” the kid blurted out as he galloped away.

“Not fair,” Gomez yelled, chasing after him.

*

The only frown on that warm, ball-throwing morning appeared without warning on Jason’s face when Gomez said that they wouldn’t visit Dodger Stadium for a game until the players strike is resolved.

“But Dad . . . “

“No, we are not going until the strike is settled,” Gomez said. “That’s it. In the meantime, we can work on your catching the ball properly. You shouldn’t catch a ball with only one hand. Use both hands.”

Jason fidgeted at the tone of the lecture but said nothing.

They tossed the ball for another 15 minutes before heading off for a celebratory soda to salute spring and the eternal quest to snare the ball like Willie Mays or Ken Griffey Jr.

“This is the best,” the perky 8-year-old finally exclaimed.

“It really is,” the father answered.

It really is.