A-way, away

To the fields of play

What is the game we play today?

The game we play

Is best of all

From glowing spring

To glowering fall--

Our own great game of BASEBALL, BASEBALL... --St. Bernard's School (N.Y.C.)   Baseball song.

Did you smell it in the air yesterday? I mean, here it is, only February, and you've been trying to put it out of your mind for at least a couple more weeks (for the sake of the NBA), but it stared you right in the nostrils.

It was a sensation that shot right up through your upper vacillary and pitched camp in that nostalgic, ever-chilklike corner of your mind. And maybe it was the warm sun, maybe it was the fact that you could put your down-filled whatever into drydock for an afternoon, but it was there, and the aroma tingled "baseball" and nothing else.

It is now that most unique time for the game which is a culture first, a sport second. Spring training, that profound ritual which baseball and its throng undergo each February, is upon us. For me, for many, it is the most welcome time of the athletically-pregnant year.

But why? For crying out loud, the very name itself is misleading, if not an oxymoron. It's called "spring training," but by the time the vernal equinox is a reality, the regular season is only days away.

Maybe the "training" should be jettisoned also. This isn't a football camp, where sweat and hamstring pulls are the entrees baked by a hot summer sun. Nor is it a basketball camp, where blisters form like a plague, "suicide sprints" aren't just a clever term. Former Boston Celtics coach Tommy Heinsohn used to call his Buzzards Bay training camp "Parris Island." Meanwhile, Rick Monday and Davey Lopes head down to "Dodgerland" in Vero Beach, Florida. The sentences seem far from equal.

Sure we all envy the ballplayer--so young, so strong, playing hookie from winter, inflation, the energy crisis, and urban blight to gambol in the Florida clime and play baseball, just play baseball.

But ironically, it is the onlooker who reaps the most benefits. For it is that unchanging and steadfast aspect of the ritual itself, the fact that spring training does and always will occur in the same way, a laid-back, almost pensive introduction to the epic of regular season that follows, that annually hoists the pastime onto its pedestal. As columnist Art Spander once philosophized, "It remains that time when athlete and spectator both dream, when the dreariness and discomfort of winter at last are slipping away, when baseball once more is the game we knew as kids."

The game we knew as kids. It brings to mind a time when you wanted to be alone as a child. It was a time when the game first became serious, when you first became involved. And if that sounds like a love affair now, that's exactly what it was....

T.V. and using your bed for a trampoline and pillow fights with your sister were now suddenly unimportant, no, downright boring. Little League tryouts were in four weeks, and you didn't make it last year because you didn't work hard enough, and aw heck if the pros can start now why can't you.

But don't tell any of your friends. Get the jump on them. Be in good shape and have your swing down by the time the leaves turn green.

So you look in the closet for your glove. Down past the ice skates and the loose checkers, past an errant bathrobe sash and those hush puppies that you hate but have to wear to assembly, past a $100 Monopoly bill, past the "What God Looks Like?" drawings you made for Sunday School, and aaahhhh, there it was.

Its yellow-white leather gleamed, and you picked it up and untied the sneaker lace wound around it to keep the pocket good over the winter. The tennis ball, which had anchored the pocket since September, popped out once you put it on, but it felt good and strong after its seven-month hibernation. And so did you.

And you flapped the fingers together and pounded the pocket with fist, then tennis ball. Curiosity to see if "the glove still worked" and if you could "still do it" coaxed you outside and thus unofficially declared the outset of your season.

You went out to the driveway and started throwing the ball against the garage door. Sure, the snow was still lingering in the corners of the driveway, and sure, it was only a tennis ball, not the real thing with the stitches and the swishing sound it makes when you throw it. But those bounding balls, those one-hoppers, those occasional line drives, and those lazy flyballs off the roof were all unmistakeably baseball, and you were unmistakeably playing it.

And though it was play, though you loped and ran around undisciplined and unencumbered, it was nonetheless work, as you stamped your foot every time one got by you, and alone, you strove toward perfection on your gravel stage.

And somehow you could do it for hours and call it fun, but it was more than a game now. The unconscious seeds of infatuation and addiction had simultaneously heen sown.