George Kimball America at Large: To aircraft passing overhead, if aircraft were allowed to fly above ball parks these days, it would have looked like the work of the alien craftsmen who periodically show up in the English countryside to laser-cut those circles in farmers' fields.
In anticipation of the Feast of St Patrick last Monday, the grounds crew at City of Palms Park in Fort Myers, Florida, had spent the morning meticulously mowing the shape of a giant shamrock into the centre field grass. The Boston Red Sox, who played host to the Cleveland Indians in an exhibition game that afternoon, took the field wearing special green baseball caps, and between innings the public address system relentlessly serenaded the sun-baked audience with Do You Want Yer Oul Lobby Washed Down, Con Shine?
"Wow," said a misty-eyed visitor overcome by the nostalgic trappings. "It's just like being in Ireland!"
With obvious exceptions (see above), baseball's ritualistic rites of spring represent a seamless time-warp. For better than a hundred years major league teams have assembled in the warm southern climes to ease their way back to fitness and assemble a new season's rosters. In that respect things aren't done much differently today than they were in Babe Ruth's day.
At 7.0 p.m. on the previous evening, in several hundred locations around the world, candlelight vigils simultaneously took place as a more or less silent protest over the impending March Madness. March Madness is a term commonly applied to the 64-team national collegiate basketball tournament which gets under way today, but in this case it has been effectively co-opted by the former president of the Texas Rangers, who now occupies the White House.
A check of the vigil's website on Sunday had unearthed the surprising news that one was scheduled for Fort Myers. That was the good news. The bad news was that as of that morning exactly 14 people had signed up to participate, and it occurred to me, as it probably did to most of the others, that it wouldn't be hard to muster a counter-demonstration 10 times that size.
Mike Greenwell's words of warning echoed in my ears. Greenwell, then an outfielder for the Red Sox, was a Fort Myers native, and the year the Boston team relocated its spring base from Winter Haven to his home city, Greenwell had called me aside and suggested that I tone down my public criticism of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been a recurring theme in the team's Winter Haven days.
"Those rednecks down there are a lot more serious than these rednecks," promised Greenwell. "They will shoot you."
It also occurred to me that, during his tenure as a baseball executive, George W Bush used to take ground balls on the infield at the Rangers' spring home at Port Charlotte, in the neighbouring county to the north.
By the time I finished work that evening I had just enough time to drive to Centennial Park, on the banks of the Caloosahatchee estuary, for the vigil, and I arrived still half-expecting to see 14 candles and a hundred white sheets. To my surprise, there were closer to 150 demonstrators, and not a heckler in sight. I jumped out of my car and joined them, purely as a matter of conscience. Not one of us actually believed there was a chance of reversing Bush's determination to bomb Iraq, but there was some small comfort to be taken from gathering with utter strangers who shared our misgivings over the course of conduct determined by the former president of the Texas Rangers.
In lieu of a candle, I produced a small, blue penlight, a gift from my intended, and joined the marchers. The instrument quickly became a conversation piece. One fellow marcher decided that I'd brought it along to represent "United Nations blue", and several others asked if there were any more available. I hadn't the heart to tell them that what it really represented was a man who had no idea where to buy a candle in Florida at 6.30 on a Sunday evening.
By evening of St Patrick's Day, Bush was back from the Azores and announcing to the nation on television the impending hostilities, which produced an immediate ripple-down effect through the world of sport. The normally placid conduct of spring training has taken on a decidedly militaristic tone as "patriotism" has been turned up a notch everywhere.
When Boston visited the Minnesota Twins' complex on Tuesday, they were handing out thousands of free T-shirts somehow establishing a link between Major League Baseball and September 11th, the implication being that this somehow has something to do with that.
The Major League office also announced that they were for "security" reasons cancelling a season-opening series between the Oakland Athletics and the Seattle Mariners, which had been scheduled to take place in Japan, and on Tuesday the NCAA hierarchy also met in emergency session to decide whether to postpone the basketball tournament.
Let it be said here that any implication that this might have been done as a gesture of respect is thoroughly misplaced. The concern, rather, was that CBS's ratings might be pummelled by rival networks who chose to show Baghdad being bombed into smithereens opposite a first-round game involving two weak teams.
In the end the decision was made to proceed. They played baseball all across Florida yesterday, and will again today. The basketball tournament will go on as scheduled, whether anybody watches or not. And, win, lose or draw in Iraq, in less than three weeks the former president of the Texas Rangers will throw out the ceremonial first pitch to open the Major League season.
Let the games begin.
