A Sign of Spring

When the baseball pitchers and catchers begin their limbering up in places like Florida and Arizona I can't help but smile. Their annual arrival in these warm weather climates heralds the arrival of spring for people like me.

My RHS friends, like Rob Lane, Dave Rorty and Jens Larson, who live year round in these temperate climates I hope remember how it is now in the northeast and how they might have felt the same thing I feel now: a great sense of relief that winter is almost over!

At the bottom of the page are two of my all time favorite lefty pitchers: Lefty Grove and Ron Guidry. You can look up their statistics but I will add that both were fearless and accepted responsibilities. I personally believe the lessons we learn in sports carry over into the lives we live thereafter; if we only bother to remember them. My favorite lesson from my years of participating in sports has always been to dare to be good. This translates into being brave enough to take a chance and deliver more than you promise. It means standing up for what is right and letting the consequences fall as they may.

I sometimes wish we could put up posters in our bedrooms the way we did as kids of our favorite sports heroes. They were so perfect in their limited sphere of influence, and they did influence a great many young people. It would be wonderful if we could do the same with public figures. Though I realize their jobs and choices are much more complicated than Lefty Grove's or Ron Guidry's. I was told by someone who played with Lefty, Doc Cramer, that Lefty truly had one pitch: the fastball. He would dare you to hit it. His 300 wins and his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame seem to indicate this worked for him. In direct opposition is Ron Guidry, who retired before he was ready to leave the scene. He came back a couple years later and pitched a spring training game against the Yankees first team and shut them down. This wasn't an "I told you so moment" for Guidry. In hindsight, Lefty and Guidry stand as role models to all the hard work that has always been necessary to put into the craft of baseball, or any profession. The beauty of sports is sometimes seen in examples of hard work we can all learn from, especially as we examine the level of effort we all put into our own crafts. Play Ball!