MONday, APRIL 2, 2001

If it's April, that means baseball

“It’s amazing how fast you grow old in this game. At first you’re the rookie right-hander; next season you’re that promising right-hander; and suddenly you’re the Old Man.”

• Dodger pitcher Don Sutton, 1977

Ah, baseball. I gave you the best years of my life.

And now it's time for another go-round. This afternoon at 1 p.m., without me in attendance, the Los Angeles Dodgers will open their 2001 season against the Milwaukee Brewers in Chavez Ravine.

The first time I ever saw a game in person, I was seven years old, part of a Cub Scout outing to see a doubleheader at a ballpark that no longer exists -- Cincinnati's Crosley Field. The New York Giants were in town to play the Reds, and all I remember was that it may have been the only time I ever saw Willie Mays play in person.

When I became a sports reporter in 1979, I started keeping track of things like that -- memorable athletes I saw in person and important events. I've been to quite a few, both as a fan and as a reporter -- a World Series, a Super Bowl, two NCAA Final Fours.

But it's the baseball memories that run deepest for me. It's the one game I really love, the one that always fired my imagination.

It certainly wasn't my best sport. I was good enough to have played football in high school if my parents would have let me, I bowled a 222 with six consecutive strikes once and I can putt like a demon when the gods are with me.

I never enjoyed any other sport as much as baseball, even though my skills were best suited to a Northern Virginia sandlot we lovingly called Eats It Field. I think it had actually been named after a man named Eaton, but you know how kids are. The fences were just 200 feet away, and the grass was tall enough to slow ground balls to a crawl.

We played all summer for three or four years, heading out in the morning and heading home for dinner. There were rarely enough players for a full game, so we played with a dead field. If you were right-handed, you had to hit it to the left side of second base and vice versa.

When it rained, we sat in Tom Kensler's basement and played Strat-O-Matic, one of the earliest dice baseball games. Now kids play baseball on their home computers, with all the sights and sounds of a real ballpark, but I'll bet it was more fun to roll the dice and see that Wes Covington had hit another home run for the Phillies.

We lived in the shadow of Washington, D.C., and since it was the '60s, our home team was the brutally inept Washington Senators. But Tom was a Dodger fan, Mick loved the Yankees and I followed the Reds (old habits died hard). Only Bob, a goofy guy known primarily for his ability to sweat in a snowstorm, lived and died with the Senators.

The one thing we all had in common was our love of the game. We followed the NFL in the fall and the NBA in the winter, but the only reason we cared at all was that there was no baseball to watch. As soon as February rolled around and pitchers and catchers were reporting to spring training, all other sports were forgotten.

Of course, that was a long time ago, and baseball has changed a great deal. Arbitration and free agency in the '70s brought on an era of labor-management acrimony that probably would survive a nuclear holocaust. As I write this, there appears to be at least a 50-50 chance that there will be another work stoppage in 2002.

My son loves basketball more than baseball and jazz music more than either, and in cities that don't have an Alex Rodriguez, a Ken Griffey, a Sammy Sosa or a Mark McGwire, getting young fans to the ballpark is far more of a challenge than it once was.

Games that used to last two hours now take three to complete, and something like 25 percent of all at-bats end in either a strikeout or a walk. Nobody hits the ball.

Ticket prices have gone through the stratosphere; the most expensive field-level seats at Dodger Stadium now go for $250, although that does include food and waiter service.

There would be plenty of reasons to give up on the game, with Willie, Mickey and the Duke long gone in retirement and even the song about them nearly a generation old.

But deep down, there's still a beauty in baseball that all the greedheads, malcontents and showboats can never destroy. There's still that amazing feeling of coming through the tunnel into the stands and looking out on that impossibly green field. There's still Vin Scully on the radio, describing the classic battle between pitcher and hitter with the game on the line.

Dodger Stadium isn't as young as it once was, but then, neither am I. The first time I ever sat in the stands was in the summer of '78, watching a Dodger team that would eventually lose the World Series to the Yankees play the Atlanta Braves.

The last time -- or maybe I should say the most recent time -- was last May, sitting in the front row on the third-base side as the Dodgers pummeled the Houston Astros.

I'll be back sometime this year, and next year, and the year after on into the future, God willing and the creek don't rise.

Why? Because it's spring, it's baseball season and with all my heart, I wish I had my glove under my arm and my bat over my shoulder as I was heading out to Eats It Field to play ball for eight hours without a care in the world.

I may never have been the rookie right-hander or the promising right-hander, but I'm certainly not ready to be the Old Man.

Not just yet, anyway.