Mike Celizic

It’s Monday. Do you know where your pitchers and catchers are?

They better be digging around for their luggage and hitting the gym, because in less than two weeks, they’re going to be reporting to training camps in Florida and Arizona to start baseball’s leisurely countdown to an April 5 Opening Day.

I don’t know that there’s a more optimistic day in the sports calendar than the one we call pitchers and catchers. The three words need no further explanation to baseball fans. They mean the day that baseball training camps open, but more than that, the day that we dare to think about the coming spring, about release from winter’s icy grip, about six months whose background beat will be the daily rhythm of baseball.

Just the anticipation of pitchers and catchers is the perfect cure for our Super Bowl hangovers. You wake up on post-Super Bowl Monday in a sudden state of panic, realizing that it’s February and the weather outside is depressing and so is the news from Wall Street. And then, you hear that pitchers and catchers are about to report, and everything feels better.

By happy circumstance, most teams will open the doors to pitchers on catchers on Feb. 14, giving baseball fans the best Valentine they could ever wish for. A few teams are going a day earlier and some a day later, with Cleveland throwing out the game’s first locker assignments alone on Feb. 12. But the big day is Valentine’s Day, a day when a sport gives you a bouquet of psychological roses, a day when baseball opens its arms and offers you a hug.

It comes at the best possible time, when the NBA and NHL are grinding through the back halves of their seasons and college basketball is gearing up for March Madness and there’s nothing compelling to watch while we’re waiting for the stupid sun to come out and warm us up a little.

Baseball has powers to soothe the soul, and in these times and in this country, a lot of souls need soothing. And few things enliven the spirit like the knowledge that baseball is about to begin.

It’s not a “whoopee!” kind of feeling, but rather a reassuring affirmation that better days are ahead. If grown men are scampering about in knickers tossing balls back and forth and trying to hit those balls with sticks of wood, life can’t be all bad.

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And even before pitchers and catchers gather in their semi-tropical playpens, the baseball clock is ticking down to a new season. Arbitration hearings are about to begin, and that should be interesting in these economic times. Arbitrators don’t award contracts based on the Dow Jones average, but the numbers that are going to start popping up in the baseball reports are sure to attract attention.

The Manny Ramirez bidding should finally start. Then there’s the World Baseball Classic. And finally Opening Day.

Times are hard, even for sports, which had always seemed so recession-proof. You realized just how tough they were when the Super Bowl pre-game show, which had become more of an Olympics-like opening ceremony in recent years, consisted of the Bethune-Cookman University marching band. Opening ceremonies are expensive, college marching bands work for a free lunch and a couple of nights in a modest hotel — double occupancy.

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The great thing about baseball is that it gives us something every day. There are always games to watch or listen to on the radio, and every morning begins with a survey of the box scores and the standings and the injury reports. Football generates passion because there are so few games and so many days to get cranked up for them. Baseball generates the comfort of fine music — not the loud and pounding kind, but the symphonic variety that plays softly. Sometimes, you don’t even notice it, and at other times a flourish or crescendo grabs your attention and makes you smile inwardly. It is a rhythm that is a constant and comforting companion through the days and months of the season, a beat to guide us through to summer and sunshine and, we hope, better times.

What’s great about it is that you don’t have to go to the park and shell out a king’s ransom to watch it. You’ll do that if and when you can, but the real magic of the game is that it’s never farther away than your radio or TV remote or computer screen. It doesn’t demand your rapt attention. It doesn’t demand anything of you. It’s simply there, day in and day out, taking each pitch as it comes, its outcome free of any dependence on clocks or time, the pitches turning into innings turning into games turning into weeks and months of simple, innocent pleasure.

The countdown has begun, a countdown not to an end, but to a beginning. Go ahead and say it: pitchers and catchers. Makes you feel warm inside, doesn’t it?

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