Baseball’s call to action is needed once again

Baseball arrived quietly last weekend, almost as if it was uncertain

about intruding on a bereaved and quarrelsome family. It needs to

understand how much a good many members of that family -- besotted

with a televised war -- welcome the intrusion.

For the past two weeks, I’ve had the TV in my office turned on

almost around-the-clock watching mostly the BBC -- which is, by far

in my estimate, providing the greatest breadth and the best, clearest

and least controlled coverage of the war in Iraq. But I kicked this

habit to watch the Angels opener on Sunday night and then spent the

entire next day watching a whole sequence of other baseball openers

in which I had only academic interest.

Well, not exactly watching. I kept the sound muted and was more

aware of the games than attentive to them. And it felt very good.

Now, I know this will appall Steve Smith, especially with the

approach of turn-off-TV-week, but each of us must seek therapy

wherever we can find it. And baseball works for me.

My annual baseball column is a week late. The Angels have already

raised their World Series flag while sleepwalking through their

opener with Texas and then blasting the Rangers two days later after

collecting their commemorative rings.

Reportage of their opening day loss was curiously negative, as if

they were expected to pick up precisely where they left off last

October. Sunday’s losing pitcher, John Lackey -- who won the final

World Series game -- acknowledged these expectations when he told an

inquiring reporter plaintively, “This is only the first game, man.”

Indeed. And there is considerable comfort in knowing there are 160

or so more to come.

The Baltimore opener was played in a snowstorm that took me back

instantly to the openers I attended at Comiskey Park in Chicago,

where the snow had to be shoveled off the field before the game could

begin.

The first demand of baseball in those days -- and now, too,

apparently -- was that it begin the first week in April whatever the

weather might be. For those of us who lived in a cold climate -- and

this was long before enclosed stadiums -- spring began irrevocably

with the baseball opener.

By that time, we had survived five months of snow and frigid

temperatures and we weren’t about to compromise spring by delaying

the start of baseball.

March was always a dreadful month in Chicago, dangling the carrot

of warm breezes one day and then socking us with a blizzard on the

next. I avidly read reports of spring training in Florida to reassure

myself that help would soon be on the way. And so we shoveled snow to

the edges of the field and played.

Thus did baseball take firm root in consciousness as our savior

from winter, with the promise of fresh beginnings for players and

followers alike.

This season, I make no demands on the Angels. Last year, they gave

me the most exciting October I’ve ever known, and I was at Edison

Field to enjoy much of it.

The same players are back for a curtain call. That is enough. A

few weeks ago, my oldest daughter, Patt, and my wife gave me an early

birthday present, a package of Angel tickets for the upcoming season.

So, if the Angels reprise last year’s achievement, I’ll be watching a

lot of it happen.

All of this set me trying to remember the role of baseball during

World War II. Right off the top, I recall two major events the year

Pearl Harbor was attacked: Joe DiMaggio’s remarkable string of

hitting safely in 56 consecutive games -- still never surpassed --

and the .406 batting average of a 22-year-old named Ted Williams.

Both would be in military service a year later.

There was some feeling that grown men shouldn’t be playing games

when fellow countrymen were dying in battle, but President Franklin

Roosevelt wrote the commissioner of baseball that he felt it was best

to keep baseball going, and so it was done. Although more than 300

major league players went into the armed service -- many

distinguishing themselves in combat -- the game continued at home

throughout the war, mostly with players too old, too young or

physically handicapped for the military, but not for baseball.

A lot of professional athletes spent World War II playing on

military teams from competing branches of the service. Military

commanders offered prize duty to star athletes to win these

internecine games.

Other professional jocks toured combat areas to schmooze with the

troops. I once flew a USO company headed by Danny Kaye and Brooklyn

Dodger manager Leo Durocher to a series of Pacific islands. So

baseball hung in until the players started to come home in 1945. And

those of us who had formed the baseball habit before the war went

instantly and gratefully back to it.

Those were different times, and we were fighting a different war

with different needs. The whole nation was mobilized then, and the

military in the field was mostly made up of civilian-soldiers pressed

into service. That happened again in Vietnam. Let us hope that it

doesn’t have to happen in Iraq.

Meanwhile, we have the start of a new baseball season edging into

our vision.

If I had any doubt about that, my brother-in-law, Dan Angel,

brought it home for me. Dan has spent his entire life preparing

himself to be the general manager of a major league baseball team.

While he awaits the call, he makes his living writing and producing

TV series and films.

He is presently in Toronto shooting a TV pilot, and when we called

him on his birthday last Monday, he told us he was giving himself a

present by going that evening to the Toronto opener against the New

York Yankees.

Several hours later, I was watching that game on television when

my phone rang. It was Dan, calling on his cell phone from the Toronto

ballpark. There had just been a frightening collision between the

Toronto catcher and the Yankee shortstop, and Dan couldn’t see the

action very well from his seat. So he called to find out if I was

watching the game so I could better explain to him what had just

taken place.

That kind of devotion to baseball is what moved Franklin Roosevelt

to keep the game going during a war 60 years ago. Maybe it can help

now, too.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.