Baseball Pace

One of my favorite baseball writers, Roger Angell, captured Spring Training as well, I’d argue, as anyone can in a passage of his book Five Seasons:

Baseball-watchers need spring training, too. During an insignificant game between the have-not Cubs and Padres at Scottsdale, I sat in the sun-drenched open grandstand behind first base and allowed my interior clock to begin slowing itself to the pace of summer, to baseball time. As I watched the movements and patterns on the field, my interest in the game merged imperceptibly with my pleasure in the place and the weather. The sunlight was dazing, almost a weight on my head and arms, and my shadow, thrown on the empty bench to my right, had edge and substance. After an infield play, I wrote “4-3” with my pencil in a box on the scorecard on my lap, and a drop of sweat fell from my wrist and made its own blurry entry on the same page. The Cub coaches sat together on a row of folding chairs outside the home-plate end of their dugout, leaning back against the foul screen with their arms folded and their caps tipped low over their foreheads, and the Padre brain trust, over on the first-base side, made an identical frieze. We were a scattered, inattentive crowd, at times nearly silent, and between pitches we stared off at the jagged, blue-tan silhouettes of low desert peaks set about the distant rim of our gaze.

I half-closed my eyes and became aware at once that the afternoon silence was not quite perfect but contained a running pattern of innocuous baseball sounds. I could hear the murmurous play-by-play of some radio announcer up in the press box -- the words undistinguishable but their groups and phrases making a kind of sense just the same -- and this was accompanied by the unending sea-sound of the crowd itself, which sometimes rose to shouts or broke apart into separate words and cries. “Hey, OK!” . . . Clap, clap, clap, clap . . . “Hot dogs here” . . . “Hey, peanuts and hot dogs! . . . Clap, clap, clap . . . Whoo-wheet! (a whistle from some player in the infield.) Whoo-wheet! . . . Clap-clap, clap-clap, clap-clap . . . “The next batter, Number One, is . . . Hosay Carrdenal, right field!” (The p.a. announcer was giving it his best -- the big, Vegas-style introduction -- and the crowd tried to respond.) “OK, Ho-say!” . . . “Hey-hey!” . . . “Let’s go, Ho-say!” . . . Clapclapclapclap . . . Wheet! There was a sudden short flat noise: Whocck!-- the same sound you would hear if you let go of one end of a long one-by-eight plank, allowing it to fall back on top of a loose stack of boards. I leaned forward and watched Cardenal sprinting for first. He slowed as he took his turn and then speeded up again as he saw the ball still free in the outfield, pulling into second base with a standup double. Real cheering now, as the next batter stood in (“. . . Number Eighteen, Bill Mad-lock, thirrd base!”), but soon the game wound down again and the afternoon sounds resumed. Clap, clap, clap . . . “Hey, Cokes! Get yer ice-cold Cokes here!” . . . Clap, clap, clap, clap . . . A telephone rang and rang in the press box --pring-pring, pring-pring, pring-pring:: a faraway, next-door-cottage sort of noise. Clap, clap, clap . . . “Hey, Tim! Hey, Tim!” (a girl’s voice). “Hey, Tim, over here” . . . Clap, clap . . . “Streeough!” . . . “Aw, come on Ump!” . . . Clap, clap, clapclapclap . . . “Get yer Cokes! Ice-cold Cokes here” . . . Whoo-wheet! . . . Clapclap . . . “Ice-cold.” Then there was another noise, a regular, smothered slapping sound, with intervals in between: Whug! . . . Whup! . . . Whug . . . Whup! -- a baseball thrown back and forth by two Padre infielders warming up in short-right-field foul territory, getting ready to come into the game. The sounds flowed over me -- nothing really worth remembering, but impossible entirely to forget. They were the sounds I had missed all winter, without ever knowing it.

This passage entered my mind this afternoon as I watched the White Sox trounce the Cubs. The familiar sounds, and sights, and most of all, that baseball pace that Angell not only mentions but captures. I’m so glad it’s nearly time for the season to begin.

I wish I had time to write more on the subject, but priorities have shifted these days and time is of short supply. Still, watching the spring training game today reminded me that I’ll have to make time for baseball. It won’t be long now... not long at all...