This week is such a great one for sports fans.
It’s the end of college basketball, with the Final Four at the end of the week. It’s the NBA and NHL heading into their stretch runs and the NFL heading into its draft. In most years it’s the week leading up to the Masters golf tournament.
And best of all, it’s the beginning of baseball season.
Rogers Hornsby was one of the greatest ballplayers ever, and maybe one of the most single-minded. From the day he left for spring training to the day he returned home at season’s end, he was fully and gloriously alive. For the rest of the year, he just waited for the next season.
If you don’t love baseball, it’s difficult to understand. But if you do, I’m not sure there’s a better feeling other than loving a friend or family member than walking through the tunnel at a baseball stadium and coming out into the sunlight and seeing that impossibly beautiful green field in front of you.
There are other places that come close — really pretty golf courses and the gardens at Versailles come to mind — but I will always think the prettiest place I have ever seen in person is the field at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. I walked on that field and sat in the press box nearly 200 different times in 1990-91 when I covered the team for a suburban newspaper.
But I had every bit as much fun in the parts of seven seasons I covered minor league ball at the Class A level, first in the Southeast and then in California. The picture above is maybe my favorite ever taken of me, on the last night of the 1982 South Atlantic League season when I was given the chance to manage the worst team in the league.
We lost, one of 89 losses that year.
In all the years I covered the minors, there weren’t many players I covered who made it to the top. But in 1994 and 1995, when I covered the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes in the California League, I covered a guy who played 15 years in the majors and hit 331 home runs.
Derrek Lee had an incredible season in 2005, winning a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger award and a batting title. He hit .335 with 46 home runs and finished third in the MVP voting.
Oh, and he also earned a World Series ring in 2003.
Maybe the closest I’ve been to real greatness again and again.
It has been a long time since I was the kid in the picture at the beginning of this story. I think that picture was taken in 1958, the first time I ever got to see New York. In those days they let you walk on the field after the game. Back then they knew people wouldn’t dig up divots or write their name on the statues.
Times have certainly changed.
But in late March 2021, it’s time to live again.
And since I talked so much about how beautiful Dodger Stadium is, I ought to leave you with a color picture.
Play ball!
Or as Ernie Banks said, let’s play two!
