A Day of Thunderbolts

This weather, punctuated by flashes of lightning and loud claps of thunder, reminds me that today is the first day of baseball. It is apropos that today I am working through Tom Adelman's book on the summer of 1975 and the "greatest World Series ever played." I sat on my front porch reading and watching the storms form and ignite, and I was startled by the timeliness of Adelman's observation:

[Watching baseball is] like watching weather form .... Two fronts collide and feel each other out. There is a distant rumble, an accumulating uncertainty, tension. Abruptly the silence is broken -- a crack of electricity. You don't always know where to look. Everything is in motion, in flux, changing, and then more thunder, and again an eerie stillness. Leads evaporate. The whole experience is ethereal. When you see the sport in person, or you listen to it on the radio, it seems to be composed partly of air, but this aspect never really comes through on the television.

Nonetheless, I will be watching the Indians play those amazing World Champion White Sox tonight in the first game of the season.