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SUNDAY JOURNAL

Joy and hope for Boys of Spring

By JAMES HARPER
Published April 2, 2006

In mid March, my good friend Mike Roberts and I went to our first spring training game - arriving, as always, 30 minutes beforehand to buy seats at the door. It was a beautiful, cool, blue-sky Florida day, and the ticket line was long. The elderly buyers ahead of us kept asking way too many questions about locations and sunlight, and we grew impatient. But when we got to the window we were cheerful and said: "Best two seats available."

The agent smiled, and offered two seats that had "just been released" a moment before. She cautioned that our knees would be pressed up against a wall.

"First row, home plate," she said.

Of course.

These $19 seats, at it turned out, were as cramped as advertised. They also were midway between the radar gun and the home team dugout, mere inches behind the screen of the backstop. Below us to the right were a group of metal folding chairs - for the batboys, we presumed.

Well, these were older, fatter batboys: the coaching staff, to be precise. And who should come to stand directly in front of us for the duration but Joe Maddon, the new manager of the "yes-it's-only-spring-but-we've-got-a-whole-new-outlook" Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

He was so close, I could have reached through the mesh and flicked him on the ear. I chose not to - and was rewarded instead with the opportunity of listening to his game banter and peering over his shoulder as he made handwritten notes on his typed lineup card.

"Something's happening. Something's up," Maddon said urgently in the third inning. Sure enough, in the next instant, a Detroit batter attempted to bunt the runner over from first. (Pitcher fields bunt, gets the out at second. Batter safe. One out.)

An inning later, when the starting pitcher began to tire, Maddon turned to the stubble-haired man on his left. "You want to go talk to him?" Maddon said, and the other guy ambled out to the mound. (Ah, the pitching coach! It's a new staff, you see, and Mike and I had been whispering to each other, wondering who he was.)

The game proceeded, and we left Maddon to his work. At the top of the eighth, however, he saw that Mike and I were among the remnant of fans who were still sitting in the same seats. "How you guys doing?" he asked.

We're great, we said, all beaming and aglow. We told him how glad we are that he has come to St. Petersburg, how good the team looks and how happy we are with the managerial tone he's setting - it's not all about how chintzy the owners are (which has certainly been true) but about how our talented young players can play the game right every day and good things will follow. Mike mentioned that he was especially glad the new manager hadn't promised something inane like "winning more than 70 games" (which, to be fair, would still be a Devil Rays record.)

"Yeah, what the hell kind of goal is that?" Maddon said. He gave an amiable shrug.

And then he returned to the field.

At the top of the ninth, without intending to, Maddon reassured anyone who has ever lost focus at the end of a long baseball game, especially a meaningless one on a bucolic spring waterfront.

"Anybody see who the new pitcher is?" Maddon called out to the coaches on his right. The name on the guy's jersey was momentarily obscured.

One of the coaches said the new pitcher's name.

"Oh yeah," said Maddon. "Good change-up."

James Harper is a communications consultant and writer in Tampa.

[Last modified March 30, 2006, 12:18:27]