Spring Training

It is cold, wet and ‘orrible.

The second big rainstorm of the year has just hit the Central Coast. According to the Tribune’s Rainfall Map, Three Peaks in Big Sur has had 4.02 inches of rain in the past 24 hours. So, all in all, not a bad day to be sitting with several litres of hot tea and the second volume of Shelby Foote’s Narrative History of the Civil War; a massive dose of Southern-Fried prose; solid military history interspersed with silly anecdotes:

Though the city [of Richmond, VA] was no longer even semi-beleaguered, as it had been…the outer fortifications had been lengthened to such an extent that wags were saying “They ought to be called fiftyfications now.”

But, spring is definitely here. The rain is here to set us up for the spring. We planted beans, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, aubergines, spring onions and lettuces last weekend, as well as a load of different kitchen herbs. The rain is falling on sprouting chives and dill as well as coriander which has been sprouting away for some time.

More than that, as the windows rattle to the beating of the wind off Estero Bay, I’m waiting for commentary to start, in about two hours, of the Giants vs Dodgers practice match. Major League Baseball is in spring training.

Baseball, I feel, deserves more attention in Britain, but is unlikely ever to get it. There’s a tendency to compare it to cricket because they’re both bat-and-ball games, which is as daft as comparing the Cheltenham Festival and The Godfather because they’ve both got a horse. The spirit of the two games, the level of teamwork involved, the social history of the the different sports, their traditions and iconography are so different from each other as to make a comparison totally irrelevant. There’s also the point that the traditional Brit response to a discussion of baseball is “What, you mean rounders?”. This is often mistaken by Americans for a serious opinion on the sport, rather than it being what it is- an easy way to annoy a foreigner. And, for the English, that’s not to be sniffed at.

There are deeper similarities between baseball and cricket than the fact there’s a bat and a ball. One is the obsession of devotees of both games with statistics and history. The reason for this is that the man who introduced statistics to baseball was a British cricket statistician who became obsessed with baseball upon moving to America.

Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball says that “It is a haunted game, where each player is measured against the ghosts of those who have gone before” It makes listening to baseball rather familiar to listening to the comfortably entertainingly, synapse-meltingly pedantic waffle on the BBC’s Cricket commentary show, Test Match Special, which sometimes sounds like a sports show, and other times sounds like the red-nosed, comfy, brandy-induced reminiscences of a retired colonel who served in India sometime before the War.

Secondly, it is the summer sport.  Here, the (American) football season is over- having come and gone, seemingly in the blink of an eye, in a torrent of  beer adverts, nachos, and vaguely homo-erotic comments about what a nice boy Tim Tebow is. So much for football.

The approach of the cricket season in England promises warm summer afternoons (no, really), the smell of homeysuckle and the buzzing of bees, and one pint enjoyed after another over the course of the day. It means a rolling-up of shirt sleeves. It means lazy relaxation in the knowledge that the evening in the garden after the close of play will be blue-skyed and possibly redolent of gin and tonics. Cricket itself has not much to do with these things, but the start of the season promises all these summer treats to fans.

Baseball is the same; Ken Burns tells us, as wonderfully schmaltzily as only he can, that “It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the cold, hard facts of autumn.”

And so, while I wait for the Giants game to start, I can reflect back on the first game of Stacey’s softball season this week. She, under her nom de guerre of “The Puma” (no, really- long story) helped Where My Pitches At beat Red Scare 11-9, scoring one and batting in two.  She had played the last three games of 2011 injured, and not at her best. But she ran bases fast, caught well and hit everything she swung at. I was really proud of her; I’m looking forward to the rest of the year.

And that’s what Spring is all about, isn’t it?