It Happens Every Spring.

Oh, to look at my Sunday paper and find a major sports story on baseball! What a glorious way to start the day.

Pitchers and catchers report to Tigertown in Lakeland, Florida this Friday as the Detroit Tigers begin spring training. Between Arizona and the Cactus League and Florida with the Grapefruit League, all major league teams will have their camps running within the week. Spring is here! Or, at least, so near that we can taste it.

Nothing says America like baseball: take that, football fans! We took the framework of a game, that incredibly dull cricket or rounders or whatever the ancients called it and, like so many things we Yanks have done (alert: tongue and cheek pro-US commentary; take it as the joke I intend it to be) made it perfect. Baseball: the ideal blend of individual prowess and team play.

Football? George Will said it best. It harbors the worst of Americana: violence broken up by committee meetings. Basketball? David Brenner is still right. Give each side 100 points and play two minutes. Hockey? Very exciting, to be sure, but all too often a game of chance: shoot the puck and hope it finds the net.

Baseball. Where skill can't be overridden by brute force. Where each individual gets a chance to show his prowess while still cooperating with his teammates. A game so special and so pervasive in our society it has no competition; it owns the summer rather than having to share the stage in season as those other games do.

Ernie Harwell, speak! Speak those immortal lines of the Song of Solomon. Mr. Umpire, say them! Say those wonderful words, those two most glorious words, the greatest words in the English, the American, language:

PLAY BALL!