Is it baseball season yet? Do we really care? I guess I/we do

For almost as long as I was employed as a sportswriter/sports editor for the Rapid City Journal, I wrote a yearly baseball column that usually matched the opening of the Major League Baseball season.

Of course, that won't happen this season because I retired as sports editor last fall. I'm not sure if I would have written another one if I hadn't retired. To be honest, this spring's labor problems the MLB owners and players' union went through just about put me over the edge. I really have not followed professional sports the last couple of years -- mainly the NFL and MLB -- like I have in the past because it has become less of a game at times and more of a social or political statement. I blame both of the league's commissioners.

My thoughts have always been to just let the game be a game.

If there would have been possibly just a few more days or longer delay in ratifying the labor agreement, I would have been done. Just like a couple of years ago with the COVID-shortened season, a partial 2022 season just wouldn't be good enough.

This comes from a MLB fan that goes back to the late 1960s, who basically followed each day of the 162-game season like it was the World Series.

For much of my season-opening baseball columns, I went back to my youth as a fan and as a player. To be honest, after a half dozen or so of those columns, I was running out of memories. I would have had to go a different direction.

Yet, looking back many of those columns were some of my favorites to write and one's my mother and her friends in Hot Springs got a kick out of.

So, I guess regurgitation is the way to go and that is what I am doing here, even through we are a little over a week from today from the actual season openers. I guess I am softening my stubborn stance on things and will still follow the game, especially my boyhood love, the Minnesota Twins.

Below is my column from April 6, 2015, published in the Rapid City Journal.

A common question throughout the years has been, “So, what’s your favorite sport?”

The answer is pretty easy: “Whatever season it is.”

I might have to clarify myself just a bit — especially for those who know me best — because when it comes to being a diehard, fanatic, out-of-control fan, I’d probably have to go back to the NFL and the Packers.

My stomach still hurts when thinking about the NFC championship game loss to the Seahawks.

But when it comes to pure love of the game, there’s no debate here; it’s baseball. Slap me if I start quoting from the Field of Dreams.

It all goes back to morning sandlot games in the 1960s in a vacant lot in Hot Springs with neighborhood friends, before riding our bicycles, glove hanging from the handle bars, to the actual team practice across town at Butler Park.

We had no uniforms, we just wore a white t-shirt, jeans, tennis shoes and a dark baseball hat. Sometimes we played Custer, sometimes we played Edgemont. Mostly, we just played against ourselves.

A few years later, when we received some hand-me-down wool uniforms, it didn’t matter that they itched or it was 98 degrees that day; we had baseball uniforms. We wore them with pride.

After practice, we rode our bikes as fast as our little legs could peddle to the Dairy Delight for an ice cream cone (if you had any money) before going home. After supper, it was back to the vacant lot until it was too dark to see (or until somebody got mad and took the only baseball we had and went home).

Anything hit over the Sewright’s hedge was a home run.

As a young baseball fan, newspaper boxscores were more important than school work.

Killebrew 4 2 3 3.

Four at bats, two runs scored, three hits and three RBIs. A search down in the boxscore would indicate that he did indeed hit a home run in that game.

There’s your sixth grade math teacher who calls your mother one night, suggesting that she should look into having her youngest son tested because he must be some sort of math genius. He writes all of these numbers on the side of his homework and she can’t figure it out.

“Oh, that’s just his sports games,” Mrs. Anderson tells the teacher with a laugh. Let’s see, 8-21, 3, 12, .380. What’s not to understand? Translated: 8 hits, 21 at bats, three home runs, 12 RBIs, .380 batting average.

To this day, I’m not sure Mrs. Hulit ever quite understood that youngest Anderson kid.

Harmon Killebrew

When there were no games to be played, there were plenty of tennis balls thrown against the garage for fielding practice or pitching. There were hours of hitting rocks with a bat-shaped stick or piece of driftwood. Hit the rock over the trees and it is a home run. Naturally, every swing was calculated. 8-21, 3, 12, .380.

To this day, I’m not sure that Mr. and Mrs. Anderson ever quite understood their youngest son.

It’s the 1960s and ESPN’s Baseball Tonight is only a dream. When it came to watching baseball on TV, it was the Game of the Week on Saturday afternoon with Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek announcing the games. Before that, it was Dizzy Dean. A dislike of the Yankees, Dodgers, Giants and Red Sox was beginning to form.

To get your fix of Major League Baseball was to listen to an AM radio broadcast while pretending to go to bed.

Even as a teen or young adult, sitting in your car, listening to a game was a nightly occurrence. Old habits never change.

Just a few years ago, on a food run that was taking too long for my late wife while she was in the hospital in Denver, I get a text: “You’re sitting in your car listening to the Twins, aren’t you?”

Busted.

Don’t get me wrong. As a kid during football season I was Boyd Dowler catching passes from Bart Starr in the back yard. During basketball season I was Jerry West shooting game-winning jump shots in the driveway.

And still puzzling Mrs. Hulit with sports games on the side of my homework.

There's also your father going out of his way on a family vacation to take you to your first Major League game in Minneapolis (even though he absolutely hated city driving). There, sitting in left field in the old Met Stadium, the aforementioned Harmon Killebrew goes 0-for-4, but sent four fly balls to the warning track, just a few feet away from where we were sitting. All four were caught by the Yankees' Roy White.

While you absorbed every at bat in every game you saw, your father's biggest memory was the beer peddlers barking out, "Beer here, beer here!" He told the "beer here" story a million times in the years to come, often just a little different than the time before.

Baseball memories are endless.

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”

You really thought I wasn’t going to quote Field of Dreams?

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