Never before has more attention been paid to a nondescript U-Haul leaving the Bronx. A gigantic white truck, boarded up and headed to Tampa, got the type of Instagram coverage generally reserved for Sports Illustrated and their body paint. And no one should be surprised. In the finally-frigid-cold chill of New York City, the Yankees’ truck full of bats, balls, and tons of gum headed south, and fans let out a collective exaltation. It’s not simply because we love baseball; it’s because baseball is the only sport where fans consider each element of a season’s creation, each indicator that we’re approaching competition, to be a religious experience worth pausing for and breathing in.
Of America’s four major sports, baseball’s the only one with the ephemeral feel. Football’s where we unleash our rowdiest urges, basketball is nature’s graceful play on hardwood, and hockey’s a combination of the two of them. But baseball’s the sport you pray to. It’s the game where the tools of the trade themselves already feel imbued with the spirit of those who’ve used them for centuries. Packing up a truck isn’t hitting a reset button; it’s carting the blood, sweat, and tears of the previous decades of toil down to the place where cleansing can begin. February baseball is a de-icing. March is a refining that becomes an anticipatory slog by the end. Let us go north. The itch is overwhelming.
Each month of baseball has its own discernible feel. And every fan knows it; the flow of the season is a universal language. But once a month is gone, it can’t be replicated. August isn’t April; kinks you couldn’t work out by late summer probably aren’t going away at that point. And while every year feels similar, month-to-month, something’s always changed or disappeared. Agents of joy from years past are gone. New faces become responsible for your pleasure or pain. In August 2015, the month when momentum swells and you start thinking about how cold your seat might be in October, Greg Bird catalyzed those familiar late-summer flames.
It was Bird homering twice to topple the Twins and save a white-hot outing from Nate Eovaldi. It was Bird rattling the walls of the bullpen with a three-run September bomb against the thorny O’s. And when October came (and went before the sun rose the next day), it was a frigid Bird manning first, thinking about what it might feel like to do this a few more times in the next several years. But this year, as the grass freezes and cracks and the truck rumbles toward warm paydirt, Greg Bird is not there. As far as 2016 is concerned, Greg Bird has evaporated, much like January. The feel of January cannot return; Greg Bird won’t be back.
But Gary Sanchez will. What Bird was to the maturation of the year 2015, Sanchez easily could be in this campaign. It’s hard to mine the system for first base depth until you refocus your eyes, shift a creaky Brian McCann to first, and plug Sanchez and his cannon in behind the plate. Hope is not lost. We’re not out of Greg Birds. We’ve got one more Greg Bird in our arsenal, and he’s got August 2016 bolded on his calendar.
Before we know it, February is March, is May, is a devoid-of-baseball November. Greg Bird is on the rise, and then he is felled. Derek Jeter is a dirt-flecked child with a sharp fade, and then he is a bald, lumbering brute, raising his arms one final time. Baseball always looks the same, but it never feels it. Cling to these feelings as long as you can, for we’ll be back here, but it’ll never be quite the same place. Unload the truck. Start the same old thing again. This is February 2016. It won’t be for long. Two weeks ago, Dabbing was still cool. Strap on your gloves. Remember those who came before. Become those whom others will someday remember. And just hold on.
