The Guardians’ home opener ignites nostalgia and hope for Leon Bibb, illustrating baseball’s timeless charm and its power to fuse past memories with present joys.
CLEVELAND — The game tugs at me. There is something special about the ballpark sounds which are comparable to nothing else. This game of baseball possesses a resonance I have known ever since I first heard it as a child. Over the years it has remained much the same. Where memories connect with the present day, a feeling overflows in me.
It is the home opener and baseball begins again. The game is special to me for many reasons. For one, it never changes. Or rarely does. All of my senses come into play with baseball. Its sights, and feel, and smells. As its sounds wherever baseball is played. At the top of my list is the thwaaack of a wooden bat on a leather-covered sphere when the two come together in a cavernous ballpark. That sound is enticing to me and is like a pied piper pulling me to the palace of players.
And so a new season has begun and I have set my internal timeclock by the beginning of a new baseball season. It marks a calendared start for me even more than a clock’s midnight strike on New Year’s Eve ushering me into the next year. I set my internal timepiece by the home opener. On the field of green the ballplayers always young. Generation after generation the players are always in the spring and summer of their lives. Only I age, but still find a comfort in recalling my childhood and my early-life opening days. There is a comfort in understanding that some things remain the same like the game itself.
The Cleveland players on the field all wear and bear our city’s name showing they are part of us and we of them. As my eyes scan what the poet has called this field of dreams I take in what I have long known.
Whoever penned the phrase hope springs eternal had it right. A new season; a new hope. I long to be in the crowd which forms a pilgrimage of sorts pushing into the cavernous stadium. It is early spring and the “Boys of Summer” help us distance ourselves from whatever winters of discontent we have faced. The players inspire the baseball faithful who dream of perhaps this year finding the “Fall Classic.”
For me a winning record is welcomed but what matters most to me is the game itself. But I am not alone. I am among the thousands gathering once again to cheer for what baseball brings. For me Cleveland baseball is almost a religion of sorts. Certainly the game is spiritual in that it uplifts me. With others finding our seats where the game is played we gather as if in a cathedral.
So the home openers marks a special beginning. Again, my heartbeat quickens with excitement. Not only for my hometown team as it scurries across the field of play but also because of baseball itself. I am touched by the game which offers no shades of grey. Every pitch is strike or ball. Like life itself baseball’s actions are judged fair or foul, calling for declarations of safe or out. The rules of the game played between chalk lines of play are the same as when I first learned them when I was a child.
Baseball is a game of threes. Three strikes. Three outs. Three times three innings in a competition where the goal is to hit the ball and run the bases. Baseball emphasizes the goal is to leave home plate and run the cornered points of a diamond, hoping someone will lead us home again.
In the Cleveland ballpark I find my seat on the sidelines as I realize the ballplayer are not the only ones running to home again for the stadium in a strange plays that role too. I am thrilled by the thwaaack of the batted ball and relish the catch of a sphere throttled deep to the outfield. I awed by the prowess of a pitcher precisely painting the corners of the plate. I marvel at the sharp grounder expertly rocketed through the infield. They all tug at my heartstrings where the love of the game strikes me as if I am the runner dashing from third base to the plate.
I am safe at home again.
With the home opener the game and I both begin again as I take in the umpire’s full-throated bellow signaling for us to Play Ball.
Yes, the game begins again.