It’s an odd juxtaposition, holding a baseball practice in the morning – preparation for a season of that quintessential American summer pastime – and then shoveling snow in the afternoon.
That was exactly the scene Sunday for our 2016 Little League team and others currently making the most of limited indoor practice time on weekends and evenings to get a jump on the season ahead, a season whose start is by now less than a mere two months away. When we entered the building where our team practices on Sunday morning, there was no snow in sight. When we came out around noon carrying our bats, gloves and other equipment, a fresh white blanket had covered everything.
Baseball, like most other sports, is no longer an in-season endeavor. To be fully prepared for the fastballs and fly balls of spring requires many unseen hours of winter practice, even when frigid temperatures and falling snow suggest anything but baseball is at hand. If ball teams waited until the weather was warm enough to get outside, they’d miss the first half of their seasons some years. Truth be told, perhaps it’s that eventual promise of outdoor baseball and warmer days ahead that gets some of us through this time of year.
But sure as the Cubs and White Sox report to spring training camps Friday in Arizona, baseball season will be here before you know it, on fields from the parks and schools of Naperville to Wrigley Field and U.S. Cellular Field and all points in between. Diamonds littered with recent snows will come to life as soon as the weather breaks, a respite from a winter that’s been a mild one by our standards but one that we’ll happily see yield to spring nonetheless.
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This weekend’s forecast temps in the 50s will tease, melting that snow and hinting at the real reprieve to come. Kids will ask to wear their shorts and skirts to school, assuming they’ve not been doing so the last few months anyway, tricked into thinking that winter is done before next week’s return to the still relatively warm but much more seasonal 30s and 40s.
In a sense, it’s football that now marks the passage of winter, though we’re really not even two-thirds of the way through the meteorological definition of that season. When the Super Bowl is played the first Sunday in February each year, knowing that we’re then less than two weeks from the start of spring training never fails to warm the heart.
And once those spring training camps open on Friday, it’s just two weeks until spring training games begin March 1 in Florida and March 3 in Arizona for the Cubs and Sox. This time of year often has our elder son and I looking forward to our Arizona spring training trip around mid-March, a trip we won’t be making this year. The winter always seems a little longer – even a comparatively mild one like this year’s – when we don’t have that vacation calling for us in the distance.
Farther out on the horizon are the Cubs’ regular-season opener April 3 at the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and their home opener April 11 against the Cincinnati Reds. The Sox open April 4 at the Oakland Athletics, and play their first game at home April 8 against the Cleveland Indians. We’re talking about real big-league games just over six weeks away!
I’ve been coaching with our elder son’s teams for a few years now, after a job change opened up more time in my schedule to do so. Since then, countless hours have been spent in gyms and fieldhouses, parks, fields and parking lots practicing with him and his teammates, an experience many others share. Though the first games of the Naperville Little League season will be played April 9, with spring break sandwiched in, by now we know that time to prepare can get away fast.
All of which makes the scheduling of practices this time of year especially tricky. Though snow is falling as I type these words and those weekend temps will be in the 50s, one can’t count on the weather around here. Conditions that may have you outside one day could have you seeking shelter the next. Every day we check the long-range forecasts – 10, 15 days out at a time – hoping for confirmation that what Punxsutawney Phil had predicted was true, that spring will come early this year.
I remember those first outdoor practices of the spring when I was a kid, 35- and 40-degree days with bone-chilling breezes, weather so cold you almost hoped you wouldn’t hit the ball, for the burning sting it would send running through your hands when you did. If you hadn’t yet bought that season’s new batting gloves, longing for that thin layer of protection was all you needed to send you to the sporting goods store.
It’s funny how things change as you get older. What were once practices that we dreaded 30 years ago, we now look forward to as adults, the chance to get back out on the field again, for the first time this year.
The countdown is on.
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works and parents in Naperville.