BILL KNIGHT

With all the chaos and evil around us all, I need additional stimuli to balance the outrage and sorrow so many Americans feel.

Fortunately, the National Pastime resumes this month, in stadiums and sandlots, and in hearts and minds longing for innocence and purity at a time of depravity and greed.

As baseball approaches, everything seems fresh and new (if cold and dormant); everyone has an equal chance (depending on offseason acquisitions and injuries), and the possibilities are endless (at least through 162 games).

I miss all that.

And more.

To rekindle my love for the game before Major League Baseball starts March 18 with the Cubs playing the Dodgers in Tokyo, I’m re-reading some of the great comments about baseball that three late pals and I shared in 20 years of pilgrimages to Opening Day at Wrigley Field.

A few favorites that still soothe me:

• “The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays,” said Lawrence Ritter, author of The Story of Baseball.
• Baseball Hall of Fame owner of the White Sox, Indians and Browns Bill Veeck (whose memoir was Veeck as in Wreck), described baseball as “played by people, real people, not freaks. Basketball is played by giants. Football is played by … hulks. The normal-sized man plays baseball and the fellow in the stands can relate to that. Destiny has become less manageable, and consequently life has become … more difficult. Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”
• Novelist Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again) said, “One reason I have always loved baseball so much is that it has been not merely ‘the great national game,’ but … a part of … our lives, of the thing that is our own … the million memories of America. Almost everything I know about spring is in it — the first leaf, the jonquil, the maple tree, the … grass upon your hands and knees, the coming into flower of April. And is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than … the smell of the wooden bleachers in a small town baseball park, that resinous, sultry and exciting smell of old dry wood.”
• And playwright William Saroyan (The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life) wrote, “Baseball is caring. Player and fan alike must care, or there is no game. If there’s no game, there’s no pennant race and no World Series. And for all any of us know there might soon be no nation.”

I sure miss the nation we happy few Cubs fans shared, especially between 1987 and 2006 in Chicago openers.

I miss the game itself and the warmth we somehow felt freezing in the grandstand, and the beer and cigars and laughter and playfulness.

I miss my friends and the camaraderie.

I miss my country. I still care.