Shut Off the Hot Stove and Warmly Welcome Baseball Back.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. ---A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. --Paul Gallico

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. --Walt Whitman

Today is the first day professional baseball players report to Florida and Arizona for spring training, so I wanted to make sure that I paid tribute to our annual national ritual and pastime.

Baseball is old to north-by-northwest Nashville, as "Baseball's Most Historic Park," Sulphur Dell, once sat in the middle of our neighborhoods. When I was born in 1963, Sulphur Dell was the oldest professional ballpark in America. Older than the "House that Ruth Built." Older than Wrigley. Older than Fenway.

I love to take our toddler for walks around the old site and dream about the baseball ghosts that haunt the area. For pictures of the old ballpark click on Historic Nashville.

Looking southeast across 4th Ave., North from the former
location of Sulphur Dell, Nashville's historic baseball park. The gravel lot in
the foreground is where new highrise condos are going to be built. On the
horizon are Riverfront Apartments, Stockyards Restaurant, and the Greenway's Downtown Connector. Photography by S-townMike.

02/17/2005 Update: The new highrise condos are to be called "Harrison Lofts." For more info about them click HERE.