Spring Training

Schoolkids are taught the equinox is the beginning of spring. For me, winter ends three weeks earlier. The beginning of March is the start of spring training. 

Baseball speaks to me of traditions, anecdotes, strategy, pacing, tension, patience and perseverance. Mark Kingwell used Samuel Beckett’s famous quote for the title of his book, Fail Better: why baseball matters. The best batters in the game still only managed to hit 40% of the time.

Baseball is an acquired taste, I grant you, like opera, jazz, brutalism, driving a manual transmission and pickled watermelon. (Hey, wait, I like all those things…) 

March can be temperamental. It is a month of tight buds, slowly loosening, and lengthening days. It can smell sweet or decaying; it can promise a gentle mildness, or it can remind us it is still a winter month. I hope March will be kind to all of us but remember:

This is Toronto. It always snows in April.