Love It Or Leeve It: Baseball Returns in War Time

It’s the best time of the year again. Forget the holidays, your birthday and the end of finals. Baseball’s back, and a little snow can’t stop it.

Baseball ranks up right up there with—dare I say it—apple pie as a prototypical “American” phenomenon, and for good reason. As the most affordable of the major professional sports, baseball-in-the-flesh is accessible to more stratums of society than, say, football. It’s also a melting pot, boasting an incredibly diverse array of players with the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Korea, Japan and, yes, Canada among the countries represented. There’s truly something for everyone at the ballpark and I’m not just talking about the availability of hotdogs, smartdogs and soydogs.

This season, however, a lot more is on our minds than the glory of our national pastime.

Reminders of the war are everywhere you look, including inside the stadiums. Most games opened on Monday with a tribute to the troops fighting half a world away, and fans are shown frequently on television holding signs honoring those in the military.

The other major sporting event right now, the NCAA tournament, is interrupted regularly with updates on the situation in Iraq. Viewers get a strange juxtaposition of fans dizzy with jubilation and soldiers battling sandstorms. Depending on your opinion of our current situation, you might disagree over which scene was the true March Madness.

But somehow, even with all those visual cues of suffering and sacrifice, there were Americans across the nation celebrating the beginning of baseball season, and I was among them.

Baseball didn’t disappoint, as Opening Day brought more surprises than necessary to make it entertaining. The meltdown of Mets starter Tom Glavine might have been enough, but the struggles of Atlanta’s Greg Maddux and news of The Big Unit tanking pushed the fun over the top. Throw in Tampa Bay’s Carl Crawford’s bedevilment of the Red Sox with a walkoff home run that ran Boston’s bullpen ERA to the stratosphere, and we had an exciting first day.

But in the grand scheme of things, these events mean little outside of the momentary joy or heartache that each game brings. Put into perspective, frankly, it’s all quite frivolous, especially in light of current events.

Pretty boy Derek Jeter’s out for a minimum of six weeks after he dislocated his shoulder, much to the anguish of Yankee fans and fantasy team managers alike. Do you think for a moment that Jeter would take six weeks off were he a marine? New Braves pitcher Mike Hampton is on the DL to start the season after he strained a calf muscle…running on a treadmill. Do you think that injury would stand for a second in the service?

I’m not saying that these athletes should tough it out and be “troopers” for their teams—that’s not in their job description. They play games for a living and entertain the masses, and I love them for it.

I agree with the thinking that sports are a necessary diversion, a welcome release from the intense world we find ourselves in. As I sit here writing this column, I’m anxiously awaiting the start to the Astros season in just a few minutes and the Cy Young soon to follow for Roy Oswalt this year. But I do believe that as much as we absorb ourselves in athletes and games, we should be aware of the world beyond our front door, our team’s ballpark and our country.

—Staff writer Brenda E. Lee can be reached at belee@fas.harvard.edu.