Dispatches: Thoughts on the start of the baseball season.
By: Hank Kalet
Keith Olbermann says that the five sweetest words in the English language are "Pitchers and catchers report today."
I can’t argue.
With soot-stained snow and ice still lining the edges of most of the area’s roads and temperatures in the 40s considered a heat wave, the beginning of spring training is like an emotional blast of summer. And it’s the same every year, the sudden uptick in stories speculating on pitching rotations and the latest phenom, all expressing a hope for success that few teams will actually achieve.
There is more to baseball than this bit of hope, of course. There is the business of baseball the absurd contracts (especially those given to journeymen like Gil Meche $55 million for five years?), drug scandals and rising ticket prices which has turned off a lot of fans. Fans like my dad, who grew up within sight of Yankee Stadium rooting for Yogi Berra and Tommy Henrich, but who now view baseball through the distorted lens of money.
Baseball has only itself to blame for the disaffection, its only commitment and I mean the institution of baseball, as well as team owners and players being to money, money and more money.
And yet, here I am, a month shy of opening day, speculating on the Mets’ starting rotation (there are a lot of arms, but no sure things, though there are a couple of intriguing lefties with a shot to make a difference), whether the Phillies have improved enough to make up the 12 games separating them and the Mets last year (I don’t think hope? so) and whether we can find three new owners to take over teams in our fantasy baseball league.
These are the questions that consume baseball fans during the month of March, as we wait for New Jersey to thaw, as we wait to find out who will be making that opening-day start, as we track the injury updates and watch the Knicks make what is likely to be a futile run at the playoffs.
I usually try to read a baseball book or two as the season approaches, perhaps something by one of the two Rogers Kahn and Angell who have authored some of the most compelling nonfiction ever written about the sport, or a collection of Red Smith’s baseball columns or essays and poems by U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall. (I’m probably going to reread Ring Lardner’s classic epistolary novel, "You Know Me, Al.")
My favorite baseball book, however, is the long-out-of-print "Baseball Wit and Wisdom," a collection of folklore, cartoons and other bits of baseball trivia and stories by Frank Graham and Dick Hyman, published in 1962 by Van Rees Press.
The book is a trivia maven’s dream. Some examples:
"Joe Wood started in pro baseball by pitching for the Boston Bloomer Girls." Bloomer Girls? Isn’t that what Yankee fans call the Red Sox?
"Al Reach, of the Philadelphia Athletics, scored 34 runs in one day in 1865" which is certainly an amazing feat, until you consider that the game was a bit different back at the end of the Civil War and that "Charles McCoy, of Fort Worth, Texas, made 31 errors in one game in 1932."
Then there are the superstitions my favorite section of the book. According to the book, a "ballplayer in a hitting streak will wear the same sweat shirt until it is mildewed," while "All ballplayers have a horror of having a man’s hat placed on a bed." No comment.
My favorite superstition story concerns Hall-of-Fame second baseman Eddie Collins, who had a "habit of sticking a piece of chewing gum on the button of his cap when he went to bat."
As Raymond Schuessler tells it (the book quotes a 1956 American Mercury story), Collins also the manager would take the gum off his cap when a pitcher would get two strikes on him and "chew like the blazes" for good luck.
"One day Ted Lyons sprinkled red pepper on Eddie’s gum before he went to bat," Schuessler writes. "When the count went to two strikes, Collins tore the gum off his cap and started chewing. He spat and struck out. ‘I’ll fine the joker a million dollars if I find him,’ sputtered manager Collins."
And that’s baseball or, more accurately, that’s how it used to be. The chewing gum, and superstitions it represents, has apparently been replaced by a syringe loaded with steroids though, on the plus side, ballplayers do tend to change their shirts on a regular basis these days.
Not everything has changed, however. When Jose Reyes smacks a line drive into the corner and turns on the jets, cruising into third with a triple (baseball’s most exciting play), all that other stuff fades and I remember what it is I like about the game.
So, to offer two words sure to get the blood pumping: "Play ball!"
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected] and his blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.

