For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land… –Song of Solomon, 2:11-12
Every Tigers’ fan worth her salt knows that Ernie Harwell always opened spring training with those words from the Song of Solomon. He then followed them with “Happy New Year, everybody, and welcome to Tiger Baseball!”
Oh, boy, do I miss that greeting. I don’t really dig following spring training too closely, but I would often tune in to that first afternoon game from Joker Marchant Stadium in Lakeland, Florida, just to hear those first words, usually drifting from my radio as I stared glumly out at a frozen Michigan wasteland. It was February, after all.
I am facing some strange disarray in my love of baseball. Usually, I’m a grump, and a grump whose existential malaise has been growing every year. Admittedly, I have a serious and deep-seated prejudice against the rich, and baseball players, as I’ve written before, are eager members of the 1%, willing to leave teams just because another club added more money they don’t need to an already grotesquely large pot. The fact of the matter is that most ballplayers don’t really care for the great unwashed all that much.
