Basebawl

Ere the slush is yet dry on Winter's testament familiar sounds are oozing up from the Southland, the crack of a bat against the horsehide and the peck of a finger against the old Woodstock. Spring baseball is back. Radiant in their new sport shirts, the scribes are again squeezing the grapefruit league for every drop.

Time was when baseball was a summer sport, played by young men who could wiggle a finger at the left-field stands without getting a banner line in someone's second section. Those were the good old days. Since then Abner Doubleday's pleasant pastime has been attenuated into an eight-months monster, devouring two-thirds of the year and thousands of tons of newsprint, bleating out paragraphs about the weight of Dick Wakefield's spikes and the quality of the umpiring in the Sally League.

What makes this more dangerous than a simple waste of space and time is the clogging effect baseball has produced on mass media and their readers. Many of us manage to survive the spring. But as the summer drags on, more and more are caught up in the slugging averages and the psychological problems of second-rate shortstops until by autumn even the most impervious are slipping a five on the series and muttering about next year.

It is only March now, and already the wires are chattering out the intrigue of the training camps. Soon the teams will be swinging north, and editors will start burying the war in a box somewhere beneath the exploits of the Toledo Mudhens. The great national hysteria is hard upon us. The annual auto-da-fe is here.