Baseball, a sport for the ages and all season
Baseball is the one major sport which begins and ends in the same year. Football, Hockey and Basketball start one year before the championship concludes the following year. NFL starts in September and finishes in February, NBA and Hockey are still going on with a season that began fall of 2023.
Baseball begins spring training at the end of February and ends in the fall of 2024. This past week, we began the real season (except for Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres who took a two-day trip to Korea to start their season the week before.)
My team is the Kansas City Royals and like every other team, opening day is the beginning of hope but since the championship days of 2015, those hopes were dashed by Independence day. The past year, Royals added pitching and so far starting pitching over the first three games has paid off. Nineteen innings, 23 K’s including nine strikeouts in the first game by Ragan and 10 Sunday by Brady Singer but the first two games saw lack of hitting and the relief pitching, which was supposed to be better, gave up six runs in the first two games.
Sunday saw a power explosion, as the Royals hit five home runs, fourteen hits and Bobby Witt, Jr. went three for five and missed hitting the cycle when he couldn’t get his double after hitting a single, home run and a triple. The Royals signed Witt,jr. to a long-term contract and so far, he has given glimpse of the future as a future of a superstar that could surpass that of George Brett, who was one of the great hitters of the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Witt has improved his fielding from his rookie year and his speed has allowed him to steal forty-nine stolen bases to go with thirty home runs. This is a rare package, speed and power and will be the linchpin of a future Royals possible championship teams. After winning only fifty-six games, the Royals revamped pitching staff and in a weak division, who knows what will happen. Hope springs eternal as we have played three games and there 159 more to go.
Baseball, more than any other sports, is played on a daily basis. From now until the playoffs you can watch a baseball game every day and it is a game that shows the ups and down of not just sports but life itself. Salvador Perez came into today game with no hits and walked out with three hits including a home run. Have a bad game, well tomorrow is the first day of the rest of the season and you can shake off a bad game and have a good game.
Baseball often is determined by the match up of pitchers and hitters. Face a tough right hander one day and a cute left hander who depends upon guile as opposed to overwhelming stuff. It is the sport that begins in the winter as many of us in the Midwest are suffering from hazards of winter and snow, but spring training is that sign that spring is shortly upon us and as the Fall Classic ends, the first breath of winter is upon us, and Fall begins its final curtain. It is a game of all the seasons.
It is a game of the ages, beginning in the 19th century, when travel was by train, stage coats and horses and corresponded with America coming of age as a world power, beginning of the automobile, the first flight of the airplanes, to the rocket age and now the computer age. NBA didn’t truly begin its emergence until after World War II, NFL began in the roaring twenties but didn’t take hold of fans imagination until the 1950’s or more correctly the famous overtime game in which the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants in 1958.
Football today is king of our sporting world, but baseball still remains as millions of fans every year trot to baseball cathedral just like Fenway Park, Wrigley field and Dodger stadium on the West Coast. New heroes are being produced and memories still made. I remember watching my first professional baseball game, Washington Senators in old Griffin Stadium. I was awestruck as I left noticing how the lights lit up the fields and while it was nighttime, on the baseball field itself, it was still daylight. Washington as they were wrought to do, lost. Last year, the Texas Rangers won the world series and for the rest of the story, I saw the Rangers play when I was growing up only they were then the second edition of the Washington Senators.