No Baseball-Winter
Blues
How does one pass the next several thousand hours waiting
for baseball to start again?
Everyone knows I'm a baseball junkie.....just can't get
enough of this game.
Was telling a college baseball coach the other day that I
have personally been involved with baseball since when I stated to play
neighborhood baseball at about seven years old.
Neighborhood baseball......... what's that? Well in my
pre-teen years we didn't have Little League baseball so if one wanted to get
really involved in this game you sort of signed up for your neighborhood team
because that was the only way to learn the game which in those days was
self-taught.
We were known in those days as the Wawanda Ave. Indians and
our home field was a makeshift diamond one lot down from the Fersch residence
and when chasing fly balls you leaned quickly how to jump the ditch and catch
the ball along Wawanda Avenue. Fly balls to left field sometimes landed in the
Gildersleeve garden.
With no school modified baseball in those days we played
inter-mural baseball and then finally as a high school freshman we made it onto
the Junior Varsity team and moved up to the Varsity as a Sophomore . Then came
college baseball, military U.S. Navy baseball and softball and
semi-professional softball in California.
The love of the game took me into coaching in the Navy which
I continued to do for several southern California college teams
and throughout the years for Little League and Pony League baseball and coaching
and general management for several travel baseball teams.
Gave up actively playing softball at the age of 50 when the
line drives got faster then my response time and I began taking too many drives
off all parts of my body.
So one can clearly see why I took up sports writing which
allows me to remain close to the game I so dearly love and respect and over the
years I added sports columns in the major sports of golf and
bowling.
Baseball this past season was not kind to Mets and Yankee
fans and when talking to many Yankee fans was actually amazed to see how badly
Yankee fans wanted to see the Red Sox lose....sort of like pay back for how
badly Boston treated them during the regular season.
The fall and winter months only provide the opportunity to
see who gets traded and what teams pay the most for free agents and then its
count down time for spring training.......which seems so far away.
I'm counting the months, weeks, days, hours and seconds to
the return to high school, college and major league baseball.
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