Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 3, 1993 TAG: 9304050236
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
RESOLVED: SPRING BEGINS - NOW
SPRING, say scientists, began Saturday, March 20, at 9:41 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. At that precise moment - the vernal equinox - the Earth's axis was perpendicular to the sun. It will not be so again, say the scientists, until 7:22 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 23. That will be the autumnal equinox and thus the beginning of fall.Don't believe it.
Oh, we don't dispute the equinoctial data. But axial perpindicularity as the basis for declaring the start of spring? How can spring be said to have begun March 20 when the weekend before featured a blizzard?
No, this weekend is the better choice for the beginning of spring 1993.
By the end of the weekend, even the last, lingering remnants of the biggest piles of plowed snow should be gone. This weekend, the daffodils are in bloom, deciduous trees in bud.
Daylight-saving time goes into effect at 2 a.m. tomorrow, governmental confirmation of the appropriateness of this weekend as spring's true beginning. On the other side of the church-state wall, Palm Sunday tomorrow starts Holy Week for most Christians; Monday night begins the Jewish Passover.
Make it a three-day weekend, and popular culture also offers confirming evidence. The winter sport of college basketball ends Monday night with the NCAA Tournament's championship game in New Orleans. Hours earlier, the good-weather sport of baseball checks in with Opening Day games at various major-league parks.
"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America," wrote Jacques Barzun, the literary scholar and naturalized U.S. citizen, "had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game . . . ."
If true, the American heart and mind are getting harder to know, because the rules and realities of baseball are getting harder to understand.
Free agency and salary arbitration have so transformed player salaries that some stars now earn in an at-bat what would have been an annual salary in 1954, when Barzun made his observation. Treated as chattel for years by owners protected by a unique exemption from antitrust laws, journeymen players today routinely make several hundred thousand dollars a year; rookies on minimum wage make $106,000.
Team owners plead poverty, yet bid up player salaries. The owners worry about declining attendance, yet force out a commissioner for suggesting that renewed labor strife - apparently inevitable in 1994 - would turn off customers. But the cost of franchises for billionaire buyers continues to escalate, suggesting that reports of baseball's financial doom are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.
In the introduction to his new book, "Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball," John Feinstein takes note of such themes. But for every egocentric millionaire he met, Feinstein also writes, he found several players who'd be in the game whether the top salary were $7 million or $7,000.
So let it pass. If one part of America's heart and mind is consumed by greed, another part is ready to kick back and enjoy. It's spring, and it's starting. Now.