Travis: 13 years
Drew: 9 years
Dad: 43 years

True, we were driving on I-10, but we were heading west, not east. Sure, we could’ve been headed west to the Cactus League, but we were going only as far as Ruidoso, New Mexico. Instead of our long-awaited trip to Spring Training, thanks to the baseball strike we were going skiing. Instead of regaling my boys, Travis and Drew, with stories of attending Spring Training games while growing up in Ft. Lauderdale, I was doing Hans and Franz imitations. Gawd. This was not the Spring Break trip I had dreamed of.

We are a sports kinda family. We esteem school and the boys make good grades. We value breadth, and the boys take music lessons. But we love sports. Travis was the starting guard on his seventh-grade basketball team this year. Drew plays hoops, too, and is a soccer star. But the priorities were well-captured this morning when Travis noted, “Dad is up close in front of the TV when golf is on, just like I am when basketball is on and Drew is when soccer is on.” To which Drew added, “And we’re all there when baseball is on.”

But baseball isn’t on anymore. Not real baseball.

In Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, Donald Hall talks of his suiting up with the Detroit Tigers, 22 springs ago. He writes, as others have, about the glorious continuity of baseball:  “. . . and my father’s father’s father who hit a ball with a stick while he was camped outside Vicksburg in June of 1863, and maybe my son’s son’s son for baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.”

But now, baseball is business, like seemingly everything else “among American things.” Another Donald, Mr. Fehr, and Bud Selig, and the rest have interrupted that continuity in gross disregard for the long generations of fathers and sons.

One Ft. Lauderdale spring in the mid ’60s Yankees third baseman Clete Boyer rented a home in my neighborhood. Ft. Lauderdale – “Where the boys are” – the very essence of Spring Break. For me Spring Break meant thousands of college kids and the New York Yankees were coming to town. I had no father, but I had lots of friends, and lots of sandlots, and, of course, Little League. I had baseball cards (long since thrown out), and armed with the statistics they provided I idolized Ted Williams. We kids imagined ourselves as Mantle and Mays. My favorite was Sandy Koufax (b:R, t:L, just like me), and my mom took me to see Koufax play the Yankees. On a school day! Over the years we saw many games, saw all the stars (well, at least those who played for teams whose Spring Training quarters were in Florida) up close, in that leisurely rhythm that is Spring Training. Autographs were easy to get, being sought only for their personal value, their evidence of having been in the presence of a player. I lost my Koufax, but still have Drysdale, Groat, and others. Cardinals coach Red Schoendienst got me a ball with Curt Flood’s autograph.

But the true highlight was Boyer. In the evenings we kids would drop by the Boyers’ rented house and ask if Clete could “come out and play.” Usually the answer was “yes.” One time his wife said they were preparing for dinner guests but he could join us after he shucked some corn. We all pitched in with his chore, so he could hit us fly balls sooner and longer. And always when he had to go in for the evening he would announce “last one,” and the lucky outfielder who made the catch would get to keep the ball.

So naturally I want my boys to have the same sorts of experiences, the same fuel for warm memories. But some of these experiences, including the Spring Training experiences, are put on indefinite hold. First we had to return our front-row tickets to four Texas Rangers games (outfield, but still front row, right next to the bullpen in the new Ballpark). Then we had to watch football in October. Now we had to go skiing.

We had our Spring Break brush with a national pastime – alas, it was the national pastime of Austria. Instead of “watch how the baserunner on third stays in foul territory,” it was “keep your tips together, and try not to fall off the chair lift.” It was a great trip, a new experience, a family adventure. But it was not Spring Training. And I don’t think my dad ever skied.

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Driving on I-10, headed west toward New Mexico rather than east toward Vero Beach, I note that the west Texas landscape looks like the surface of the moon, only less colorful. We laugh and read and anticipate our snow-based adventure as the miles repeat. There is a stultifying brownness to the place. Everything is brown, except the rare field that has been planted and irrigated. Water is obviously dear, saved for the life-sustaining crops. Even the most upscale homes that can be seen from the highway have some sort of dirt-and-rock yard. However, in my Spring-Trainingless funk, I notice, as we pass through the little west Texas town of Van Horn, they are watering the outfield grass of the Little League complex. The outfield grass.