Sunday, April 05, 2009
Sports, "Hunt's Grunts"

Play ball!

So I have decided give baseball another try...

By Hunt Archbold

So I have decided give baseball another try, having recently been coerced into gathering my spikes and catching gear from storage in order to help an adult league team for a few innings a game behind the dish. I can only hope the results aren’t anything similar to my last game two summers ago, when the baseball gods told me in the most brutal way that my diamond days were done.

The grand game has been on my mind lately, with another Major League Baseball season beginning this week—but not entirely. How could it, when one opens the newspapers and is fed so much doom and gloom? At least there are still some newspapers left to open, although this chosen field of mine has, without question, seen better days. The last several weeks have brought the closure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, marking two of the largest closures in recent memory.

Then last week, roughly 120 employees of the San Francisco Chronicle accepted voluntary buyouts as a result of the paper’s struggles to avoid sale or shutdown. Similarly, two weeks ago the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced it was laying off 30 percent of its news staff. We sports fans who grew up reading the paper are witnessing the slow death of newspaper sports sections, as big-city papers across the country, from Philadelphia to Boston to Detroit to Miami to New York to Cleveland, fight an ongoing battle for survival.

Surviving the current global economy was the topic of the day as the G20 nations met in London last week. While there were some disagreements, there was unity on the issue of tax havens and financial centers that thrive on bank secrecy laws. There was also a unified pledge to crack down on offshore bank accounts that have helped fuel the current global financial crunch.

One of those havens, as identified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, is the Cayman Islands. During his campaign last year, President Barack Obama referred to a building there that supposedly housed 12,000 U.S.-based corporations as “either the biggest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

I didn’t see that building while vacationing in the Caymans recently, but I certainly experienced much of what one of the planet’s most beautiful locales has to offer, both above and below the seas. And when I saw youths playing cricket, the Caymans’ national sport, it reminded me of baseball. When I looked out of my window on the plane and saw Cuba, I also thought of baseball, that country’s official sport. Next week, for a brief moment, Obama will put the nation’s problems aside as he throws the first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ home opener. Hope springs eternal with the start of baseball season.

My last baseball game was two years ago at Osborne High in Smyrna. It was a devastatingly hot and humid August day, and I was very dehydrated, having caught the first game of a season-championship doubleheader. Having previously won Game 1 of the best-of-three series, and with a chance to clinch the title with a win in the opener, our team lost on a walk-off homer in the ninth. I knew I was in trouble as the second game began and my muscles began to cramp. My vision was blurring, but in the fourth inning, with a runner attempting to steal, I snapped out of my crouch and as many of my muscles constricted, I managed to three-hop a throw to third that, while very ugly, was accurate enough to nab the runner.

But I was done right there. My entire body was one intensely painful charley horse. I couldn’t move. As I withered in pain in the only shade to be found, behind the dugout, I quickly realized I was lying in an ant bed. Those little suckers chewed my arms and neck something fierce. Our team was routed in that second game, and it took me several days to recover. I swore I’d never play again.

And yet, now I’m back. The widespread troubles of this world—and there seem to be so many—well, they can be overbearing. But in the stadium or on the field, only what happens on the diamond counts. Baseball has a way of emulating life itself better than any other sport.

Within those nine innings, a host of players takes the stage, batting, pitching, catching and running. Some will impact the game in a positive fashion; others will not. Just as in our daily struggles, we encounter a constantly changing cast of characters. Some of them knock it out of the park; others take strike three looking.

And then there are the ones who cramp up and lie in a bed of ants.

Happy times … and see you at the ballpark. SP