THE BELL CURVE:

It’s unfortunate that the opening of the baseball season conflicts with the ending of March Madness and taxes. Bad timing.

Baseball in its preseason state demands total attention. It’s the one time in the six-month season when everybody is even. Kansas City, Seattle and Washington can dream about hosting a World Series next October with greater hope because last year Tampa Bay did just that, vaulting from last place to first in a single year.

So it’s time for us purists to expose those of our friends and acquaintances who are spouting questionable baseball stats and insights at cocktail parties while failing the ultimate test of studying spring training exhibition game box scores daily. And time for me to hook up with Dan and Don.

That happened last weekend at a family birthday party from which we were allowed to remove ourselves for the ceremonial division of the tickets.

We’ve been doing this for a decade, and it is performed with the solemnity due such a process. Originally there were four seats and four partners, but we lost one member along the way and had to cut the tickets from four to two even before the economy collapsed.

The seats, which we have renewed each year, are in the upper deck, a location I at first resisted but have learned to like. We are between home plate and first base and command a view of the entire field with a minimum amount of people passing in front of us. The downside there is the sun. Both my daughter Patt — who shares this gig with me — and I are troubled under direct sun to the point of bailing out if it gets too hot or too frequent, as it does in July and August.

That became a bigger issue this year as the Angels schedule of day games continued to increase, especially during the middle of the week. And trying to trade a Wednesday at noon ticket for a weekend night is like trying to swap a Reggie Willits for a Vladimir Guerrero. The only other major issue every year is making sure we share equally games against the Dodgers, Yankees and Red Sox. No give here.

But we managed. We’re ready. Going to the first game of a new season next week is like the first day in school, examining your surroundings to see if the same people have survived the imminent depression enough to renew their tickets. And if a staff of sore-armed pitchers can keep the Angels afloat until the varsity gets healthy.

Nothing sums up this feeling as well as the first scene in the musical “Damn Yankees.” The curtain rises on a couple of senior citizens, the man hovering intently over a radio and his wife standing over him, arms folded and singing:

Six months out of every year,

I might as well be made of stone.

Six months out of every year,

when I’m with him — I’m alone.

So play ball!

To go from the sublime to the ridiculous and flog a dead horse and two cliches one more time, the recent behavior of the Costa Mesa City Council reminds me of the late columnist Art Buchwald’s take on Richard Nixon’s early departure from the presidency.

Buchwald considered one of his primary achievements in a long journalistic career was making Nixon’s enemies list, so he was deeply saddened when Nixon was no longer around to provide him with ready made humor columns. Buchwald said he didn’t have to waste time on research as long as he could quote Nixon’s public statements, accurately and at length, thus offering citizens who could read ample information on which to pass political judgment.

I thought of how well this applied to the mea culpas in the Pilot of the four Costa Mesa City Council members who couldn’t walk across the street to pay their respects to a visiting president of the United States.

Their explanations are required reading for local voters. No further comment is necessary.

Gary Monahan’s boss wouldn’t let him off work, even though Monahan owns the place where Monahan works.

Mayor [Allan] Mansoor didn’t want to give the impression that he was “begging for scraps” for the citizens he serves by breathing the same air as Obama.

Eric Bever was afraid of violating the Brown Act, which apparently didn’t occur to anyone else, and huffed that if the president wanted to meet with him, he certainly hadn’t said so. So Bever sent a substitute just like draftees who didn’t want to serve did in the American Civil War.

And Wendy Leece said that when it was clear that she and Obama weren’t going to talk over Costa Mesa’s problems, there wasn’t any other reason for her to waste an afternoon seeing the president of her country in close-up action.

And there you have it. Some words to live by when the next election comes up.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.