Game Over, Play Ball

“Dad, when will baseball be back?”

It should be an easy enough answer: Traditional Opening Day is March 27, 2025. All 30 teams will take the field that day, but only 28 of them will be playing for the first time. On March 18, the Dodgers begin their title defense against the Cubs — in Tokyo. So when will baseball be back?

The annual rite of spring — the day that pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training — is so ingrained in our culture that we refer to it simply as “Pitchers and Catchers.” Three words that can melt snow.

That’s not an issue for a kid from San Diego. My six-year-old son wanted a date. In his vernacular: How many more sleeps until baseball?

He was motivated to ask, I believe, when he learned that a game on TV recently was, sadly, a replay of a playoff contest from last month.

Growing up in Baltimore, the elements had a way of keeping such questions unasked. Baseball season couldn’t be willed back. Frog wasn’t arriving to tear off the winter months from Toad’s calendar. To generations of fans that drew life force from newspaper box scores and radio calls, the offseason seemed interminable.

In San Diego, there are no driveways to shovel, no snowmen ironically holding stick bats. You can have an actual catch in December. Hell, last New Year’s Eve, I happily stood in knee-high water while my daughter boogie-boarded in the Pacific.

If the offseason feels shorter in Southern California, that’s because it will be. The Dodgers might have the shortest offseason ever. They won Game 5 of the World Series on October 30. One hundred and thirty-eight days later, they’ll play again.

Will baseball be back then? I’m still not sure.

Winter Competition

Just as my son’s Fall Ball season is winding down, we had a breakthrough. Like so many great societal advancements, it was serendipitous and motivated by boredom. Restless at his sister’s softball game, my son grabbed my glove and started tossing a ball up in the air to himself. Then a funny thing happened: He caught it. The glove was a little too big for him and way too heavy, yet he caught about half of the attempts. He was having fun.

A few days later, he tried the 50-year-old hand-me-down that had been an extension of my left arm for so many years. Before too long, he was referring to himself as “a catching machine.”

The Joe Rudi model, snaring balls over five decades from Baltimore to San Diego.

I never expected that Joe Rudi would become a key figure of WTP. But the Rawlings HJF77 model glove that bears his signature on the palm is still making plays. Most days now, you’ll find it attached to my son’s left hand.

It makes too much sense in retrospect.

Youth gloves are plastic. They don’t break in, they don’t mold to a hand, they don’t even respect spending the night under the tire of an SUV. Adult hands are too big to wear them and work them; kid hands are too weak to squeeze them. Youth gloves have more in common with the straw baskets that hold cheap Chianti than any piece of leather bearing the slogan The Finest In The Field.

But consider a well-worn piece of leather — the pocket broken in during the Carter administration, the laces fraying since Rudi himself retired after the ’82 season. I have a feeling we’ll spend much of the winter with that glove in hand.

So when will baseball be back?

Life’s short. Throw strikes.