Steve Christilaw: Start of the baseball season is a time full of wonder

What a difference a year makes.

A year ago at this time, while some high school basketball fans were beginning to realize state tournament dreams, wrestlers were making their final preparations for state and Gonzaga basketball fans were hoping for a good warm destination for the first round of the Big Dance, high school baseball and softball coaches were busy manicuring their fields well ahead of the first turnout.

The frost had long since melted into a distant memory and there were even patches of green grass showing in area outfields. Infields had been dragged and were smooth and ready for ground balls.

The air was cool, sure. But that frosty crispness had long since departed and that annual bite hitters suffer in their hands when they mishit balls in batting practice became minimal.

Teams were out on the field on Day One of spring turnouts and stayed there for the entire season.

This year? Feb. 27, the opening day of the high school baseball and softball season will be here before we know it and winter is showing few signs of leaving any time soon.

But it’s just a matter of time – especially if you’re one those folks who believe the happiest day of the year is the opening day of the baseball season.

And that day arrived this week.

Pitchers and catchers began reporting to spring training this week. For the Mariners, they reported Tuesday and had their first workout Wednesday.

For some folks, the sounds of birdsong in the sunshine is the first true sign of spring. For some, it’s spying that first crocus poking its head up through ground that, just days before, had been frozen solid.

For me, it’s the unmistakable sound of a ball popping into a leather mitt.

It can still be downright cold outside and there could be snow flurries floating in the air, but if there are baseball players warming up in the local high school outfield, a calm settles over my baseball-lover’s soul that has been missing since the last out of the World Series.

The Hot Stove can keep you interested over the long, cold winter. Watching where free agents land and calculating the potential of the ones who land with your team is good, clean baseball fun, but it pales next to being able to pore over the box score.

There is something special about watching young pitchers throw off a mound for the first time, working out their mechanics and finding the release point that will get the ball over the plate. You can close your eyes and listen to the session and know when he’s gotten himself loose and begins throwing easily by the sound the ball makes when it hits the catcher’s glove.

It’s the same thing with hitters and batting practice. I miss the sound of a wooden bat and it’s taken awhile to get used to the ping of a modern, metal bat over of the familiar crack of good-old, All-American ash. Either way, you can hear hitters getting dialed in.

When you stop and think of it, baseball asks the impossible. A pitcher throws a sphere toward the plate, a batter holds a cylinder and is told to “hit it square.”

It may be a scientific impossibility, but you can hear it when it happens. It sounds like a tuning fork hitting just the right note and it is, pardon the pun, pitch perfect in the most satisfying way.

I watched Mickey Mantle and Al Kaline take batting practice as a kid, and I know it would have been the same had I been old enough to watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig or Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio take their first cuts in February.

I’ve been known to turn on the baseball channel broadcasting from the Grapefruit or Cactus leagues just to watch the early routines. It may only be bunt drills, with pitchers faking a throw to the plate and then breaking to first base. The players may be young and fresh, but these are the same drills I watched when it was Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale, Mel Stottlemyre and Juan Marichal running the drills.

It may only be fly ball practice in the outfield, but it’s a solid connection to the days when I watched Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente run the same drills.

It’s baseball season, and that means the new year is finally beginning. Here. In Phoenix. In Ft. Lauderdale. For the West Valley Eagles and the Chicago Cubs, the Central Valley Bears and the Seattle Mariners.

They all start the season the same way, tied for first place and full of dreams.

On the horizon is the World Baseball Classic, Opening Day in Cincinnati and Atlanta, at Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, the first games of the Great Northern and Greater Spokane League and, later on, playoff games that will keep us on the edge of those cold, spring bleacher seats.

And won’t it be grand!