The most popular, cringing sensation you’re supposed to remember from your schooldays is … eeck, yes, fingernails on the chalkboard. But for me, and I’m sure for any kid who ever played baseball, there is no more painful memory than hitting a baseball in cool weather and having the bat sting your hands. Oww. Man, that hurt.
For that matter, it hurt just to catch a baseball when it was unseasonably chilly. But then, in the upper parts of the United States, isn’t it always unseasonably chilly in April? Is April ever seasonable? T.S. Eliot, who grew up in St. Louis and Massachusetts, knew exactly what he was saying when he wrote: “April is the cruelest month.”
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If there is one remark about the weather that everybody from north of the Sunbelt makes, it is: “You know, we have great falls, but we don’t ever get spring around here.” Everybody says that like it’s only the case where they live. It isn’t.
In most of what is generously called temperate America, spring is a myth. And this year, of course, it’s ridiculous. This is the year there is no April at all, just a 61-day March. And 2007 is surely the cruelest month, ever, for baseball.
Of course, spring is when schools usually play baseball. That is why, I’m sure, the Society for Baseball Research has figures which show that a disproportionate number of major leaguers come from the southern part of the country.
Northern boys suffer no climate discrimination in other sports. But a kid, say, from Michigan or Maryland simply doesn’t get the chance to play baseball anywhere near as much as his alter ego from Georgia or California. College teams down south start playing their regular season before professionals even go to spring training.
There is, though, something of a twist. A pitcher only needs 60 feet, 6 inches of warm gymnasium to perfect his art, so the climate hasn’t that much effect when it comes to pitching. As a consequence, there is almost surely a greater percentage of Northern pitchers than Northern batters in the majors.
Tom Glavine of the Mets, who grew up in Massachusetts, is approaching his 300th career victory ? and he played hockey for much of the year when he was a kid. Glavine is Exhibit A for the theory that teams ought to sign Northern pitchers, because the weather didn’t allow them to pitch so much as kids, so their arms have been better preserved. If you live up North and want your boy to be a baseball player, tell him to put down the bat and pick up a resin bag.
Much has been made, too, of the large numbers of Latin American ballplayers, and certainly it is the economic consideration which leads so many young Hispanics into the game. But at least some of this phenomenon can be ascribed to the beneficial baseball climate in the Caribbean. One of the things we keep hearing about is how fewer African-Americans make it to the majors these days. The subject is front and center now, because this is the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line.
But that is obscured by the larger truth that there are also fewer Caucasians making it. There are simply fewer Americans, white or black, in the majors now. And with the many Hispanics and more and more Sunbelt Americans being able to play the old ballgame where there really is a spring, the national pastime is becoming the Southern pastime.
Oh well, we always have global warming to even things up.
Frank Deford?s column also appears as commentary Wednesdays on National Public Radio?s Morning Edition. Deford is a Baltimore native and an award-winning author. He can be reached at [email protected].
