Write Team: Bringing baseball to life

I’m not sure how I missed this but opening day in baseball, one of the most coveted days in all of sports, has already come and gone, somewhat quietly.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres opened the 2024 baseball season in Seoul, South Korea. This was the first time an official MLB game had been played in South Korea. Tyler Glasnow got his second Opening Day start for the Dodgers and Yu Darvish started for the Padres. This was Darvish’s fourth Opening Day start.

The rest of Major League Baseball will start their season this Thursday. The White Sox will host the Detroit Tigers while the Cubs will travel to Arlington, Texas to take on the Texas Rangers.

I have written before about my tepid appreciation of baseball. I have run hot and cold on the sport and usually it happens only a month or so apart. This time of year, when the season opens, I love baseball, mainly because it means that spring and subsequently summer have arrived with warmer weather. Even though the weather has been warm, this year I’m still ready for some baseball.

As part of a Facebook Readers Club, I’ve been going through some old books to see what titles I would recommend to others in terms of a good read. I came across a book I picked up a couple of years ago entitled “Ball Four” written by former major league baseball player Jim Bouton. Jim grew up in Chicago Heights and played at Bloom High School. He signed a contract to play for the New York Yankees in 1962 and helped the Yankees beat the Cardinals by winning two games in the 1964 World Series.

Jim’s book was the first “tell-all” book in sports, not just baseball. The setting for the book was the Seattle Pilots’ one and only operating season. Unlike previous sports tomes, Ball Four named names and made no attempt to protect the innocent or the guilty. Jim did this by writing with almost complete honesty about the way a professional baseball team actually interacts – not only the heroic game-winning home runs, but also the petty jealousies, the obscene jokes, the drunken tomcatting of the players and the routine drug use.

Jim wrote with candor about his pitching role on the team. He also disclosed how rampant amphetamine or “greenies” usage was among players. Also revealed was the heavy drinking of Yankee legend Mickey Mantle, which had been almost entirely kept out of the press. The book had such candor that it was banned by then baseball commissioner Bowie “Ayatollah” Kuhn. That was Jim’s name for him, not mine.

I met Jim a couple of years ago at an insurance conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. We hit if off, no pun intended right away and hung out at the pool together, had lunch together and were going to play golf until we both admitted we’d rather sit by the pool. I purchased Ball Four while I was in Scottsdale and had Jim autograph one for me. He wrote: “To Jonathan, the best 2nd baseman I have ever seen.”

Sadly, Jim passed away in 2019 from cerebral amyloid angiopathy, which is a type of blood disease. Maybe it takes meeting a legend like Jim Bouton to bring a sport alive. Or maybe it’s just really being tired of winter. Whatever the case, I am glad the season is about to start. Hey, let’s play two.

Jonathan Freeburg is an Ottawa transplant for the past two decades-plus and a regular contributor to 1430 WCMY Radio. He can be reached at newsroom@shawmedia.com.