The New Year in Neverland

The New Year shouldn’t start on the first of January. Why we would choose to start our calendars at a time when the days are so short and cold, and everything lies fallow is beyond my understanding. To start each year under gray flannel skies seems like an act of self-hatred, a nihilist’s snide prank on all of humanity. It is too empty, too brutal for a proper beginning. Nobody chooses January as their favorite month. It is an injustice that Americans should and would rectify, if only the more enlightened among us could pound some sense into the bean-counters and bureaucrats who live to dot I’s and cross tees.

We should celebrate the New Year in March, when the full rosters report to spring training and the exhibition games start in Arizona and Florida. That should be the start of our American calendar – a time when every fan can look to their team with love and hope, when all things are still possible, all the losses and mistakes are still forgivable, and everyone knows in their heart of hearts that this will be the year. That’s how a New Year should begin, with thoughts about sunshine and forgiveness and full of confidence of future glory.

So we begin another hopeful year. The rain and snow has come and mostly gone. The sunny days are starting to gain on the cloudy ones. Plants are green again, and the ground is muddy still, but no longer frozen. The cherry blossoms will be blooming in another couple of weeks. The days are getting longer, climbing the big hill up the roller coaster until the end of June, when we will all begin the lovely ride down the other side.

These are some of the thoughts that occurred to me last night, Monday, April 2^nd, 2012, as I watched my San Francisco Giants beat the Oakland A’s in an exhibition game at AT&T Park – my team, my ballpark – in their first home game of the year. I am a season ticketholder again, a luxury I refuse to give up entirely, even though I split my tickets to keep them affordable. I hadn’t planned on going to this meaningless exhibition game. I had, in fact, given the tickets to this game to my ticket partner, thinking it would be better to wait until the official home opener two weeks away. But at the last minute, a friend called up and said he’d lucked into two tickets between home plate and first base, free tickets, and would I like to go?

Here’s a little lesson I’ve learned in life: when life hands you a free baseball ticket, go. Whatever else you have to do will get finished. Never let chores get in the way of your life.

Baseball is timeless. That’s a cliché observation that has been drilled into the literature and lore of baseball by every writer that has ever tackled the subject, and all of them do it more justice than I can here. But it is baseball’s timelessness, both literal and figurative, that sets it apart from other sports, and other games. Basketball, football, hockey, boxing, wrestling, even running and swimming and cycling and motorsports are anchored to the clock, measured out in time. Baseball is played separate from the clock. When the first pitch crosses home plate, the time is announced – “First pitch, 7:18 p.m.” last night – and then the clock is completely ignored. The game can go on and on, into the afternoon, past sundown, into the night and under the lights. An inning can be quick-quick or it can fatten and swell and stretch. If you’re paying attention to the game, the clock disappears. And if you’re really paying attention, it isn’t hard to imagine the calendar disappearing, the deep smells of roasting hotdogs and peanuts, garlic. The girls in sun dresses, the boys in jerseys, the men in hats. It could be last summer. It could be your first summer. It could be your father’s or your mother’s. Your grandfather’s.

Baseball takes the whole summer. It is every day, not like football, a one-game-a-week event that is all fiercely autumn. Football is about endings and downs, about taking away yardage and fighting. Baseball is about beginnings.

And that’s how it works its magic on you, how it keeps you young while it makes you sentimental. No matter how many gewgaws or how much tinsel the bean-counters and the bureaucrats hang on the game, no matter how loud they play the music or how much they charge for a beer, people will still need to feel time stop, and the afternoon swell into evening, and they will still need to believe that their life is full of more beginnings. Baseball is Neverland, a place where you never grow up, never grow old, and never even notice the clock.