Spring Training: Clouds, Music and the Game

The Seattle Mariners were playing against The San Francisco Giants in one of the spring training baseball games in Phoenix last week and my sweetie secured 2 tickets along the 1st base line, comfortably positioned behind the visitors dugout. With plenty of time before game, we casually wandered through the ticket gate, bought 2 hot dogs and 2 rather large and rather delicious cold beers. Feeling as though we might be undernourished, I returned to the concession stand and bought a cookie ice cream sandwich and a bag of peanut M&Ms! And that’s when the magic started to unfold.

This was a Thursday, a day after a lot of rain resulted in the Wednesday game being canceled. As we entered the stadium everything all at once presented itself. The clouds were the first to take our breath away. A combination of white and blue, immense puffs of steam, even larger than those huge, inflatable snow men that decorate some people’s homes at Christmas. The billowy clouds hung perfectly still, covering the horizon from one end to the other, with swaths of sheer blue sky quietly and patiently waiting for the game to begin.

The location of our seats had another surprise — the perfectly placed speakers above our heads, attached to the awning that hung just rows away. A seasoned DJ could not have done a better job in selecting the genres of music that flowed

from those speakers. It was the type of music that children, adults, men, women, republican and democrat could recognize and thoroughly enjoy. The robust volume and quality of sound made it that more entertaining. Music that moved your heart and your feet, simultaneously.

Before the game, there was the ball park. Immaculately dressed in all its field of green with perfectly browned, hosed and raked sand, and with the bases spotlessly polished to a grey-white awaiting the first foot steps of its occupants. And then the players came. Those uniforms! The Giants with their orange, tightly fitting pants and jackets decorated with white strips of material at just the right points on their bodies to highlight their fitness. And the Mariners looked like little characters out of a baseball movie — with white pants and aqua-blue tops and complimentary colored hats. Is this a Hollywood movie or real life, one had to ask.

And so for a moment (actually closer to 3 hours) as the game progressed, the world relaxed and forgot about the issues that were dividing it and draining it of life’s pleasures at other times.