Play ball

This morning it was cool and damp and the sky had that quilted look that promises more rain later. But that is just weather.

Of more import is what day it is.

It is Game Day.

It is the day when the gates open at the corner of Ewing and Brackenridge, and the ballpark dabs on its most alluring perfume: equal parts grilled meat and pungent hints of hops and malt, and of course popcorn and roasted peanuts in the shell. The ticket takers are at their stations. The game programs are laid out. The diamond is all perfectly groomed beige and impossibly vivid green, spring and the rains that come with it having done their work.

Parkview Field is open for business again, after too long a time gone dark.

There was no baseball there last summer, and the summer felt counterfeit because of it. All those dreaming young prospects in TinCaps green and gray and red were no longer giving us names to remember in the lingering twilight of a May or June or July evening.  Fernando Tatis Jr. wasn't out there, nor Ryan Weathers, nor the local kid from Ossian, Josh Van Meter.

There was no crack of the bat, no rising murmur to accompany a baseball rising toward the battlements of Harrison Place. There were no Bad Apple Dancers or Johnny TinCap or taco sauce races, or Jake the Diamond Dog, heartthrob of ballpark regulars everywhere.

Tonight all of that is back,  if the rains stay away. Tonight we'll be reminded again of what's unique and charming about minor league baseball, preserved here in the Fort despite Major  League Baseball's best efforts to eradicate its charm and uniqueness elsewhere.

MLB's misbegotten goal is to make the minors more uniform, and also more profitable. So it got rid of 42 minor-league teams in the offseason, many of which had brought that aforementioned charm and uniqueness to their communities for decades. Those teams that were left were reorganized into antiseptic Class A-AA-AAA groupings, and rules were imposed that would give MLB more direct sway over the product.

Control freaks gotta control, as they say. The rest of us can only hope that doesn't mean the minors will become as boringly homogenous as the majors have become.

We can only hope there will remain the regional quirks and oddities that have been the minors' calling card since there have been minor leagues. And that places like Clinton and Burlington in Iowa, stripped of their minor-league affiliations by the MLB vandals, find something to fill the hole in their summers that baseball filled for, respectively, 87 and 97 years.

And here in the Fort?

Tonight we get again what we've gotten for 28 years, first in Memorial Stadium and then downtown. The Bastard Plague took it away from us last summer, leaving us with our own strange emptiness to fill. As with any absence, it made the heart grow fonder.

So grab a dog and a beer and settle in again, ladies and gents. Baseball is back.

And, it goes without saying, a proper summer, too.