Winter Blues For The Baseball Soul

Cold reminders of summer

- Steve Rushin

Behold the ballpark in winter, an unsettling place, like a History Channel model of a post-apocalyptic world: field and seats covered in white, billboards advertising to nobody, dugouts devoid of Dubble Bubble, bullpens bereft of relievers. Everything looks abruptly abandoned to a desolate winter, possibly a nuclear one.

And so the giant coffee cup that looms as a caffeinated colossus over Dunkin’ Donuts Park in Hartford doesn’t jettison a spray of steam in the winter, withholding its warmth when we need it most.

Let Old Faithful or the fountains of Bellaggio issue their geysers at predictable intervals year-round. The coffee cup only erupts when a Hartford Yard Goat hits a home run. It stands at the interchange of two interstates, and reminds the 275,000 motorists who pass it on any given day—myself included—that the world is a cold, forbidding, Goat-less place, at least in winter, when nobody’s going yard.

It’s true of ballparks all over North America in winter, when racing sausages fly south, organs fall silent and food in polite society is no longer served in batting helmets. The wind blows neither “in” nor “out” in January. It just blows. And so does January.