Stadium Scene Offers A New Perspective

The transformation was complete, Jon told me. I was now a full-fledged, card-carrying, freedom-loving American. And thanks to a particularly bad sunburn, I was also a bit of a redneck.

There I was with my shades on and my baseball cap turned backwards, experiencing the taste of freedom. It tasted like Dodger Dogs.

This was part of a three-day, three-city, three-ballgame trek around the not-so-glamorous parts of Florida that I took with fellow columnist Jon Kamran three weeks ago. It was all about spring training on spring break, where the only wet t-shirts were our own as we sat in the sweltering heat, using carcinogenic quantities of sunscreen while peanut dust clung to our legs. But for a couple of baseball fans who were tired of hearing about the Mets’ epic collapse and the Yankees in flux, a trip to spring training was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Waiting two more weeks for opening day also seemed like an eternity. We needed a baseball fix.

Transposed to Port St. Lucie, Vero Beach, and Tampa, though, Major League baseball took on a completely different feel. Sure, the stars were there—Johan Santana gave us a pleasant surprise by pitching for the Mets—but nothing was at stake. It seemed like scores and innings existed only to tell when it was time to go home. And last week, after seeing the movie for the first time, I understood that spring training is in fact the big leagues’ Sandlot.

“I found out that they never kept score,” the narrator recalls at the beginning, “They never chose sides, they never even really stopped playing the game. It just went on forever. Every day they picked up where they left off the day before.”

It wasn’t exactly that—the Boston Red Sox sure as hell knew they were playing the Yankees when we saw them on St. Patrick’s Day—but, to me, that’s how it felt. Time slowed down, the sun shone bright and the sights, smells and sounds of baseball were everywhere.

All at once, there was the smell of grass and sunscreen, the all-enveloping heat (which, after leaving New York, was the best hug you could ask for), the sound of umpires calling balls and strikes, the crack of the bat, the smack of a ball hitting leather, obnoxious vendors and more obnoxious fans, and, whenever a play went wrong, the constant refrain of, “Whatever, it’s only spring training.”

But none was so fond of that phrase as was one of the Cardinals’ fans sitting behind us in Port St. Lucie. He described himself as a teacher “at a school for bad kids.” Here was a man who loved baseball—he must have weighed 280 pounds and sat there all afternoon in scalding heat, never removing his polyester Cardinals jersey as the sweat bucketed down his face.

Then there was his friend, on shore leave from the Navy, who spent more time in line for beers than in his seat. The people sitting around me became as important to the experience as the people on the field. In front of us were the two ladies from New Jersey who let us hitch a ride to Vero Beach. In spring training, that’s called coming up in the clutch.

In Vero there was the father in the Kirk Gibson jersey who brought his two boys on the Dodgertown pilgrimage. With a combined age of maybe 18, those two kids knew more stats than I ever will and genuinely cared about helping us keep score whenever we missed a play.

And now, as I prepare to spend a lot of time covering big-league baseball, I realize just how much I learned on that trip. I’d been raised on stories of the Brooklyn Dodgers and had always followed the game closely, but, growing up outside the United States, I’d missed something about it. All that stuff you don’t see on television, the atmospheres the cameras can’t capture, the moments that get lost in commercial breaks, and all the quirks that get covered up by corporate polish once the regular season rolls around.

But in those three days, I took a big step toward that visceral attachment to America’s game with one big bite. That Dodger Dog was delicious.