Let the fun begin
With the opening of the Major League baseball season less than two weeks away, there are millions of people in this country, including me that look forward to the utterance or those fabled words "play ball" and the first pitch that soon will follow.

Taking Names and Keeping Score Charlie Anderson

For a lot of us it will signal the real beginning of spring and serve as official notice that the days of wearing cold weather clothing is all but over and that the attire best suited for the heat of the summer is what we need to have in our closets.

That first pitch will also be the first note in a rhythm of life that will quietly but constantly play in the background for the next six months of the year and in so doing provide some assurance that there is at least some sanity left in this world which is seemingly becoming more insane by the moment.

For the genuine baseball fan like me it will begin one of the best times of the year and will revive memories of years gone by when as a child I listened intently to the radio broadcast of games on a late afternoon and into the night as we sat on the porch wishing for a breeze to help cool off a hot summer evening.

It will spawn other memories of the period in my life when my children were first discovering the game and the great times we shared watching games on television or traveling to a Major League park to see one.

With that first pitch the exploits of the greatest players in the game dating back to the likes of Cobb, Gehrig, Johnson, Ruth and Young; through the years of Aaron, DiMaggio, Koufax, Mantle, Mays, Robinson, Snider, and Williams; and onto the present with Bonds, Clemens, Griffey, Howard, Shilling, Otiz and others will all come to life.

So will the stories of some of the greatest characters of the game like the legendary Dizzy Dean who in the spring of 1934, when his brother Paul joined him in the St. Louis Cardinals pitching rotation, predicted they would win between forty-five and fifty games between them and then made good on his prediction when the two of them won 49. There will be memories of Yogi Berra whose way with words would astound the most astute grammarian.

Don Larsen's perfect game will come to mind, as will Bobby Thompson's homerun dubbed the "Shot Heard 'Round the World". Reggie Jackson as Mr. October, Babe Ruth and the "Called Shot, Bill Buckner's ground ball, the Black Sox scandal all will surface again in the memories of those to whom baseball is more than a mere game that kids play.

The list could go on and on but we don't have the time or space. So without further ado, let's play ball!

Until next time......be safe!

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