The Anacrids' scribe Jim Edelman already covered well the facts of the Spidermen's 6-4 win over the Americans to open the over-62 season.

So what's left?

For this player, it's rediscovering the game and its players. To wit, I've found that there's such a thing as the "three-inning seasonal warmup"
to start a new campaign.

Which means? If you haven't swung a bat nor seen an incoming baseball since last summer, it takes the mind, the body and anything else
that powers a swing at least one at-bat, or for a team three innings, to make any significant contact. And so it was: both teams got
only one hit through the first three innings, and each happened to come off the wood of the catchers, Jim Wing for the Anacrids
and Mike Labarge for the Americans. And then both teams took it upon themselves to score most of their runs in the fourth inning.
Warm-ups done; the hitting game commences. Baseball's got symmetry.

Then there's the old maxim: "If it's April ball in Albany, it's tight muscles time in Albany." That's not always true, but in my 25 years
playing rec ball here, I"d guess the brrr factor was a part of, oh, 21 Aprils. For the contest at New Scotland, the game-starting temperature
was 55 degrees and the game-ending one, after six innings, was at 45. Which pretty much meant stiff muscles for everybody, a condition
in which throwing power seems to leave an arm. And that in turn meant a hat's off to the game's two relief pitchers the Anacrid's Lee Madsen
and the Americans Vinny Koster who somehow found they could still throw the ball 60-feet for strikes in very chilly weather.

And then there are the returning faces. That's the best part. Sometimes the funniest. Still, it's good to see familiar schnozes again,
and whiter hair and beards, and to hear well known cackling laughter on both sides of the diamond. The hanging thought, for
all 20 or so players on the field, is "Hey, look at that! That geezer's back. Imagine?"

Which produces the thought, by way of Mel Allen: "How 'bout that, fans?"

-Mike Hart



-- Edited by mikehart on Saturday 29th of April 2023 02:43:24 AM