Radio Free New Hampshire: Spring Training Report

By Michael Davidow, InDepth NH

The Boston Red Sox are a professional sports team, so nothing they do matters at all. Yet they have either been making me happy or breaking my heart since I was five years old. Before that I liked Milwaukee because the Brewers had a golden M on their caps, for which I felt a personal affinity (see my first name). I switched when I learned the Red Sox played local and nothing has changed since.

I finally visited Florida this spring, where the Sox have pre-season training. Every street in Fort Myers is eight lanes wide. It rains at night, turns warm in the morning, then turns hot. The local beach is filled with bars and you need to drive either north or south to find the white sands and unbroken seashells the Gulf Coast is known for. So you make that drive, you find that sand, then to your kid’s chagrin, you are the only person in sight wearing long pants. Things like that happen to people from New England.

Dinner comes from the ocean, the side dishes swim in butter, and no reason exists to take anything but key lime pie with your coffee. Breakfast is southern, so biscuits appear. We were all rushing to get moving until we tasted our first biscuit. Then we all slowed down. The best restaurant around is located on a charmless inland industrial road, away from the water, away from the tourists, where the palm trees are merely factual and the truckers know the waitresses. Fort Myers is just fine.

The Twins play there too so we met a few people from Minnesota at our hotel, which like that good restaurant existed in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t talk politics. We talked about Harmon Killebrew instead, a man who played third base fifty years ago.

Baseball has that effect on people. Faces change but the game doesn’t. A left fielder named Manny Ramirez once complained that he could have made a hit but for a certain opponent being in just the right spot to rob him. Overhearing this, Boston’s designated hitter David Ortiz laughed out loud and informed his teammate they’d been playing this game a long damn time and there’s always been a shortstop in the same damn place.

The Sox play in a stadium which is shaped like Fenway Park back in Boston so the players can get used to its dimensions. Outside the chalk lines, though, it’s an easy situation. You park for free in a big empty field. Retired folk who are working for fun wave you around with little orange flags. People chat you up as they show you where to go. They are the same kind of guys who work in courthouses here.

The stadium itself is surrounded by practice fields so fans come early to walk around. The players themselves go from field to field for their different drills so you occasionally find yourself walking alongside some big tall kid in a bona fide uniform with a real high number on his back, indicating his real low status. The first stringers hang around too. They sign autographs like in the movies. Kids and hustlers line up accordingly.

Batting practice is a study in rhythm. Every swing is both the same and different. (A samurai general preparing for battle received a message from the head of the local monastery. “Our cherry trees are blooming.” The general wrote back that he was busy with battle plans. The monk answered, “Of course. The cherry blossoms await.” The chastened general left at once to make up for lost time.)

Aroldis Chapman pitched in the game we saw. Chapman is an old man by baseball standards. He’s in his thirties. I have seen him on television a hundred times but seeing him up close is still a revelation. He threw a bad pitch, he appeared disgusted not at himself but at the pitch, and he caught the catcher’s return toss with more nonchalance than I ever thought possible. He did it walking away without even looking. Chapman is a pro.

Temper your justice with mercy, warned the prophet, complicating our lives from the get-go; nothing comes easy, nothing is black and white, and nothing about baseball matters. It’s a game with rules that everyone accepts. No fine judgments needed, no balancing, no moral dilemmas, no crime that can't be answered with a fastball to your ribs. Nothing about baseball matters at all. Still, in the middle of a war, you can even write a column about it.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.