Steve Christilaw: Baseball full of ups, downs, surprises

Some great minds and even better wordsmiths have tackled the game of baseball.

So have lesser minds and smaller vocabularies.

There were baseball books around as soon as I got to school and I read many of them. Somewhere I still have a well-worn and well-read copy of “The Baseball Life of Mickey Mantle.” It went into the box right after I read Jim Bouton’s book, “Ball Four.”

That’s part of the appeal of the game. Baseball, and by extension, softball, can be taken at any level. If you are only a casual fan, you can still enjoy a day at the ballpark. If you are hardcore, you can take a deep dive into the numbers and statistics as deeply as you want.

Meanwhile, the game goes on at its own pace.

Just as it has room for fans at so many different levels, so too does it have room for a variety of takes. At one end of the spectrum you have the erudite analysis of George Will and Thomas Boswell. At the other end you have MLB Network pundit Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo, who is so animated that he makes basic hyperactivity look like a beach vacation.

That is the nature of a game that begins in the spring and stretches through the summer and ends with the Fall Classic. It’s a game that is timed with a calendar instead of a time clock.

It is so unhurried that the game can be stopped so that the coach or manager can walk to the mound to have a conversation about how the game is going and where they want to take it next.

There is no halftime, but there is a traditional seventh-inning stretch where some teams will break into a rendition of a Neil Diamond song.

And if no one wants to take the lead, they just keep playing extra innings.

At the high school level, the season is shortened so we can crown a state champion before the seniors on the team graduate and head off to college, but the concept is the same. The pace of the game is the same.

And then there’s this season.

There have been thermally challenged years like this one before. Thankfully, they have been rare.

Monday afternoon at West Valley, the Eagles played a fastpitch softball doubleheader with Deer Park. It was the first time the home team had been on its home field. To practice. To play ball. Any of it.

To put that in perspective, the first day of spring practice for baseball and softball was Feb. 25. And the first time the Eagles stepped onto their softball field for any reason other than doing the hard work of making the soggy field playable, was exactly a month later.

“We were going to play,” first-year coach Brian Ostby said. “If I had to put bases down in the outfield, we were going to play.”

West Valley is not alone, although the Spokane area is a bit behind the tropical, southern climes of, say, the Tri-Cities. Those areas are a week or more ahead of us when it comes to playing outdoor baseball and softball.

The games that are played on a diamond have a shared backbone that grows out of daily routine and a wealth of repetition.

In any other year, infielders will have taken hundreds of ground balls before they see a bouncing ball in a game. Outfielders will have shagged countless fly balls. Teams will drill on the double play from every angle and work for hours on what base to throw to and hitting the cutoff man on plays to the outfield.

So much for that this year.

There is no leeway for teams to play themselves into shape.

Softball has it a bit easier. One good pitcher can carry a team through a doubleheader, then come back to pitch again the next day.

Baseball has limits on how many innings a pitcher can throw before having to leave the mound. Compressing games into a shorter time frame, even for a couple of weeks, will favor teams with a deeper pitching staff.

Without a time frame for developing a defense, veteran teams will have an edge. For now.

But that’s what makes the game so much fun.

The game is bigger than the obstacles nature puts in front of it. It will adapt. Good teams will find a way and good players will step forward to help shoulder the load.

The challenge facing teams is still the same this spring, even if there are fewer days in which to get it all done. Win and move on. Get your team into the playoffs. Ignore the record – just keep your playoff hopes alive.

That could well be the story this spring will write.

In the end, it’s all going to be about which team is playing the best baseball or softball at the end of the year.