Lowell Cohn: There's a lot to love about baseball

I am in love with baseball, with baseball objects, with baseball's implements. Next week, they return to our lives.

I am in love with the bat, with how it looks - light wood or dark wood, grainy wood or smooth wood - and how players hone the bat handle in the clubhouse or the dugout with that bone, and how the bat is customized and has the player’s signature on it.

And I am in love with the sound a bat makes hitting a ball. Nothing like that sound. I long for that sound. That pop. Sometimes that crash, if crash even describes it. In Bernard Malamud’s first novel, “The Natural,” he even named the bat. Wonderboy. It was a thing of legend.

No other sport has a sound to rival bat-on-ball except golf on a tee shot and hockey when stick hits puck hard. Sports are full of special sounds, baseball’s being the most special.

And baseball gloves. My god. I have loved baseball gloves from the first one I owned at age 8, a Rawlings four-finger model I loaded with Glovolium oil and kept near my bed. Glove leather feels snug and soft on your hand. You break in your glove. I love the term break in.

I love how major-leaguers get custom-made gloves in all colors, tan or brown for sure, but red and blue even. I love how gloves smell - leather and oil and spit and sweat. What other sport has such a smell? Basketball and football are great games, but lack smell and so many feels - leather, wood, ball. Baseball appeals to our senses, is a tactile wonderland.

Oh, the baseball. I love the ball. It is beautiful and it is dangerous and it is hard - just like life. No one has to blow up a baseball or measure its air content. It is as simple and direct as a rock. It has raised red stitching on white cowhide. What a word, cowhide. The ball fits in an average-sized hand. It has a feel. You get a feel when you heft it. Pitchers get a feel when they throw it.

And the ball must be clean. Pristine. That white cowhide gleaming in the sun. And the pitcher gets a new one, sometimes after each pitch. The ball is the holy object of baseball. Come on, it’s the holy object of major sports. And it must be clean and unblemished.

I love the rosin bag. I know this sounds corny. But try to imagine baseball without the rosin bag sitting there, waiting on the back end of the hill like an old rag someone tossed there. Until you see Santiago Casilla grab it and rub it on his right palm and then turn over his hand and bounce the bag up and down on the back of his right hand.

Pure art with an old rag.

And I love the mound and how it dominates the infield - the position of power. And how Jeremy Affeldt used to labor back up that slope after each pitch. And I love that spike scraper on the back of the mound. Just sitting there so pitchers can dig mud out of their spikes.

And I love bases. Pillows. Big and white. And how the grounds crew changes them mid-game. I love the name grounds crew. And I love 90 feet and 60 feet, 6 inches. Magic numbers in our minds since childhood.

And the on-deck circle. Pure love. And that donut the hitters slide on the bat handle and they swing the heavy donut-added bat so the bat feels light in the batter’s box. I love the batter’s box and the clean lines and how the leadoff hitter rubs off the back line. And I am fascinated by pine tar.

And flip-down sunglasses. How I wanted a pair when I was a kid. And batting cages, and players leaning against the back of the cage until it’s their turn. And Bob Melvin and Bruce Bochy leaning against the cage and looking at their hitters. And all the time, the pop and crash of balls flying to all fields. And the batting-practice pitcher behind that little gate so he doesn’t get murdered by a line drive. I love a line drive.

And I love baseball uniforms. The white for the home team and that gray for the visitors - it looks like a white uniform got put in the dark wash by mistake. And how uniforms take us back to the 19th century. And how baseball mostly is the same as it always was, a continuous background to our lives.

I am in love with baseball stuff. Like when old Comiskey Park had the basket that popped out of the ground behind the plate umpire to deliver a fresh set of balls. And golf carts that deliver relief pitchers from faraway bullpens. I love bullpens. And the reliever getting his warm-up pitches on the mound, and the home-plate umpire standing there in his dark blue uniform counting the pitches. I love how players refer to umpires as Blue. I love when an umpire rings up a batter. I love the phrase “rings him up.”

I love grass and infield dirt and players sliding in dirt and players having dirty uniforms.

And I love riding in my car and listening to radio announcers - Ken Korach - translating pure sight and sound into gorgeous words for my imagination to feast on. Or even into ordinary words - “Butler takes a 1-1 fastball for ball two.”

I love ball two.

I love how baseball has no clock. Could go on forever.

I guess I’m saying I love the look, sound, feel, smell, pace, anticipation and memory of baseball. If that isn’t love, what is?

You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.