Who Needs Baseball?

The Mets will likely send Jacob deGrom to the hill on Opening Day

                                          
 

By Harry Cummins

     The Major League Baseball season is at our doorstep.  For those of you who possess an innate understanding that hitting is all about timing... and pitching is about upsetting timing, and that home is where one must always start from, then there awaits a lifetime burning in each calculated pitch and each unpredictable swing of this most anticipated of baseball journeys.

     'Blue Moon' and 'Oil Can' have long since departed the sport but a new cast of characters has captured our imagination..  What will be the nicknames we lovingly attach to the likes of Wander Franco and Bobby Witt, Jr?  

     It should be noted straight-away that baseball is not an obvious game.  The poet Walt Whitman uncovered profound things in the game while Thomas Boswell claimed, more than any other American sport, baseball creates the illusion that it can almost be understood.  Leo 'The Lip' Durocher simply said baseball is a lot like church.  Many attend, few understand.

     Your opportunity for enlightenment, and maybe even a swing at salvation, begins on April 7.  May you celebrate your team in victory, and stay faithful in defeat  It may be just what our contentious culture needs right now. 

      As James Earl Jones once opined, "baseball reminds us all of what was once good.. and that could be again."    

     It's Opening Day. Time your season swing for the fastball but you better be ready for the bender. Faith and doubt, blessings and curses, all in the daily striving to find home. 

     I need baseball!