At the end of every winter, as the numbers on your Weather app gradually tick upward, it comes. That smell. Usually with a damp early evening, maybe after a morning rain that swept away the remnants of last weekend’s snowfall. It’s just fresh. Clean. In a flash, I’m 10 years old. I feel the sting and then the numbness when you hit one off the end of an aluminum bat, I see the sheen of fresh oil on my glove and I hear the punch of my fist deep in its pocket. I feel the flutter when I step into the box, digging my cleats into the dirt and tapping the far corner of the plate. I see my dad, standing at the other end of the cage, reach back and release. I feel the shame of, once again, stepping toward third base rather than centerfield on my swing, but I consider it a victory because at least I didn’t duck away at the pitch. (I was a bad hitter because I was always scared…or maybe it was the other way around?)
I’m 30 now. It’s been nearly two decades since I last did any of these things. But those senses stick with me. And every year, at just the right combination of warm/cold, wet/dry, night/day, winter/spring, I feel it.
There are a lot of reasons to hate baseball right now. Owners are richer than they’ve ever been, but minor league wage remains near the poverty line. Fans are reduced to choosing between one awful human owning their favorite team or another merely selfish one. And, of course, the game is still in the middle of perhaps the biggest scandal in its history — an example of gamesmanship-gone-way-too-far that is almost certainly not limited to one team and has been around in some form for more than a century. Baseball as an industry is broken.
But baseball as an institution, a pastime, a spirituality? Yeah, it’s still around. You can feel it. It’s right there, between those impossibly straight and white chalk lines in the dirt. It’s embedded in the subtle, delightful cat-and-mouse between a pitcher and a hitter, distributed to thousands as hair-on-end electricity before a 3-2 curveball with the bases loaded. There — blink and you’ll miss it! — when a catcher pulls a changeup an inch off the plate back to the middle, and the umpire lets out an affirmative guttural and the hitter shakes his head.
It’s okay to be disillusioned. It’s okay to expect better from people named Manfred and Hinch and (sigh) Beltran and Wilpon. I do, too. But I also watch Juan Soto shuffle and lunge after taking a ball, grinning at Zack Grienke. I appreciate the mastery of Jacob deGrom every five days. I delight in grown men with animal nicknames doing incredible things and having fun, too.
It’s baseball season.