The Red Sox Best Prospect May Just Surprise a Few Fans

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People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.   –Rogers Hornsby, St. Louis Cardinals et al, 1915-1937

When is the best time to talk about baseball? To kibbitz about the sandlots, chat about the national pastime, jaw about the oldest of professional sports? Well, right now, of course! And please, even if you are not a fan: hear me out.

For you see, there is nothing like dreaming of baseball when the air is still frigid, and the ground is still frozen and covered with snow. When a warm April afternoon that feels like resurrection with the sweet sounds of wooden bats cracking and umps yelling “PLAY BALL!” seems so, so far away…that’s when to anticipate the return of this fair game, only 75 days or so from now. Close, yes, and yet so distant. Major League baseball returns on March 31^st and for the first time since 1968, all thirty teams will play on that first day of the season.

But before then? Can we at least about talk baseball and the coming season of flowers budding and trees popping and days lengthening and playing catch in the backyard?

Talk spring. SPRING!

Yes, I know chances are good that you are not a baseball geek like yours’ truly. At 61 years old, I know I am probably too old for this obsession that began for me as a little boy, listening to the local nine on my transistor radio. Going to my very first game with my grandfather and brother and three cousins, on a perfect July afternoon that I will never ever forget. I know I spend an inordinate amount of time in winter watching old baseball games on TV, or calling my fellow baseball aficionado Eric, who hails from Minnesota, a place even farther away from spring.

But back to the play on the field.

You see this January, to get me through the coming weeks, I’m following my absolute favorite player these days, a lean and lanky prospect from the suburbs of Minneapolis, a kid whose got all three tools for the best of play. Can catch, can pitch, can play first base. Has a good eye at the plate and is also a great locker room person, someone you want as a teammate, forever enthusiastic, always positive, standing on the top step of the dugout, cheering on teammates. Now I know I am biased in my selection of this young rookie, who actually is many years away from the big leagues at thirteen years old (but turning fourteen very, very soon) and who I am not even sure wants to play in the big show.

Still, I think she absolutely belongs on the sandlot, whatever the level of play.  She’s not always been supported by the powers that be in her pursuit of playing baseball, has been overlooked a few times because “she’s a girl” yet every time she’s gotten push back, she pushes back, hard.

She just wants to play.    

Her name is Bridget, my amazing and wonderful Goddaughter who has loved baseball since the day almost nine springs ago when I watched her pick up a bat, swing at a ball, and run down the basepaths, all with a smile a mile wide. From then she has absolutely adopted this game as her game. She’s played every single spring and summer, first in the T-ball league and then Little League and then middle school age travel league and come next year, maybe even for her high school team.  She’s the one I can always count on in my life to take in a game, or to beckon me right after supper, to go out back and throw the ball around.

I was thinking about Bridget and her love for the game because of a neat story that broke last week about pro baseball.  The New York Yankees became the very first professional baseball team to hire a woman to manage one of their affiliated teams. Come this spring Rachel Balkovec will skipper the Class A Tampa Tarpons. That’s in addition to one Bianca Smith, who is the very first African American woman to be hired as a professional baseball coach. She will work with rookie prospects for the Boston Red Sox this March in Fort Myers, Florida.

Which goes to show that even in the oldest of pursuits, even in the the most traditional and patriarchal of sports, things can change and for the better, for inclusivity, for a welcome and invitation to all who want to play, just play. To compete and all on a level playing field. I read those tales of women breaking through that glass ceiling and thought of Bridget and thought of baseball and thought of spring and thought of how much right now I could use some good news like this.

We could all use some good news, stories that while not world changing, nor universe altering, bring a smile to the face and a warmth to the heart, warmth we all really need in the depths of a third COVID winter.

So, yes: let’s talk baseball, talk spring!  These will both be here before we know it. Thank God.