Baseball Is Like Church

By now, you've read, or should have, that the Norwich Sea Unicorns, undefeated since changing their name from the Connecticut Tigers will be joining the Futures Collegiate Baseball League, the FCBL. Think YMCA but with different gyrations and contortions (I can see the Sea Unicorn mascot dancing on the dugout roof during the mid-inning break now). 

The FCBL is a wooden bat league (which is the way the Good Lord intended baseball to be played). FCBL ballplayers are unpaid collegiate athletes who hope to gain experience and exposure to Major League Baseball scouts. The Sea Unicorns' home opener at Dodd Stadium is Memorial Day, at 7 PM. Tickets went on sale Monday and you can get information on all the home dates, fireworks, and ticket prices here 

I'm delighted there will be baseball atop the mountain this season but there are a lot of business expenses and cost-sharing details the city of Norwich and its namesake Sea Unicorns will have to work out (full disclosure: I was on the Baseball Stadium Authority for the first ten years of Dodd Stadium and while baseball fans see a sport, it's a very serious business), so I'll keep my fingers crossed that everything that needs to be agreed upon will be worked out equitably.

I don't know much about the FCBL (you can already hear the song in your head, can't you?) except that regular-season games that are tied after one extra inning are settled by a home run hitting contest. The team that hits the most homers in three minutes wins. I would have preferred they'd chosen a pie-eating contest but that might be because I have a travel fork I take with me everywhere.

The FCBL does have the designated hitter rule, DH, and as a National League guy (except for my passion for the Yankees) I'm vexed. I dislike the DH and not just because I wonder where guys like Ruth, DiMaggio, and Aaron might have ended up if they could have sat on the end of a dugout during the dog days of August and come out and batted three or four times a game and then sat down again.

Do what I do a couple of times every summer: stop someplace where kids are playing sandlot ball or Little League and ask how many want to play baseball when they grow up. And then, next, ask them what position. Guess how many of them say Designated Hitter? Yeah. Game, set, and match.

Apropos “game.” And I hate to be unctuous about this (no, I don’t): the purpose of baseball caps evolved as the game matured. They were intended to shade your eyes from the rays of the sun because The Lord intended baseball to be played outdoors and during the day (only) so S/He could watch from heaven. The purpose of the workweek during any baseball season was, and remains to this day, to get in the way of going to a ballgame.

I do not understand why other sports teams have ball caps. It's not part of their uniform, and for the NFL, how would your guys even wear them? Under the helmet or over it? And that goes for the NHL, too, come to think of it. And I would stop smiling, NBA; sports in tiny shorts; so millionaires in their underwear? Seriously? 

But humor aside (you were wondering about the previous paragraph), professional baseball is a business and because it's driven by television advertising dollars, day games have gone the way of the dodo, or just about. And for a sport that started out as 'family entertainment' major league baseball has long since lost the plot on that point. So if we go back to my sandlot full of kids playing baseball, maybe none of them want to grow up to be players because it all happens after their bedtimes. 

But in a little more than two weeks' time, basically in our backyard, some bright and eager hopefuls, with equal amounts of talent and enthusiasm, will take the field and make Dodd Stadium their own field of dreams. And we can all watch. And cheer them on.

-bill kenny