Missing Baseball ... Already

Last night, the Houston Astros, in a rather dull seventh game in what had been a very exciting World Series, became the champions of professional baseball for the very first time.  The Astros, which had been born in 1962 as the Colt .45s, and had suffered a league switch (their previous trip to the World Series had been in 2005 as the National League champions), were an exciting, mostly young team representing a city that had had, to put it mildly, a rough year.

Yet even as I was watching the game last night, I was feeling the pangs of loss.  After all, it is now November, and there will be no baseball until Spring Training next year.  It will be mid-February before the online columns are really roaring, and very late March before the games that count begin.

I'll miss it.

I've written of how the onset of Spring Training is the absurdly sweet promise, not just of our own team and what they might actually accomplish this year that they did not the past year, but of life itself -- the incipient springtime and the blooming of the planet -- OK, at least in the northern hemisphere.

As good as that is when the season starts to warm up, well, there is the corresponding darkness that envelops us right after the conclusion of the World Series.  In a few days, Daylight Savings Time will evaporate, and darkness will fall each day at dinnertime instead of an hour later.  The gloom of the crepuscular late afternoon will match the gloom of the lack of a baseball game that night to excite our senses.

I'll manage.  I won't manage as well this year, mind you, because in our new home the local cable service does not carry much hockey, which I do follow somewhat.  College basketball is long dead, waking up only for our gambling itch to be scratched in March, and the NBA ... does anyone watch that?  Are they even still in business?  And the NFL, well, even when the players weren't embarrassing themselves too much to watch, that was really only Sunday anyway.

But I will manage.  I'll follow the Hot Stove League, the post-Series and winter season of trades and free agent signings, which actually started at 9:00 this morning.  I'll hope that my team will do well in restocking its roster, knowing that most of those new contracts turn out to be albatrosses anyway.

And I will watch other things at night when I was watching baseball.  Maybe play "Field of Dreams" a time or two.

I'll be OK.  But I'll really, really miss baseball.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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