Spring Training is Here + a Photo Worth 1000 Words (To Me)

The Toronto Blue Jays spring training schedule officially kicked off on Saturday afternoon with a game against the New York Yankees in sunny Florida!

After months of no baseball and baseball scandals and waiting for baseball, the first step toward the new season has been taken, and I’m into it. I always am. The combination my dad’s birthday (Feb. 14), my birthday (Feb. 21), and the start of spring training (mid-Feb.) has always been a favourite time of mine. I love/loved my dad, I love my birthday, and I really love baseball.

And now, I’m passing that down to Ollie.

Baseball feels like it’s in my blood. I watched games with my gramp in his basement as far back as I can remember. My dad played. My mom played. Both of them coached me when I started playing when I was 5 or so. I played until I was 16. I played with older kids. I played on championship teams. I lost in big games in big tournaments. I loved it.

I was the kid that memorized players and their teams. I was the kid that threw the ball against the wall so much that I was told to stop… so I flipped the picnic table onto its side and threw against that instead. My siblings and I played 2 vs 3 games in the backyard. I couldn’t get enough.

Baseball was my first love.

Will baseball be Ollie’s first love? I don’t know. But I do know that things are going well with my liking the sport and cheering when it’s on TV and recognizing the Blue Jays logo and smiling when something baseball related is happening.

And yesterday, when that first spring training game of the 2020 season was on TV and I went to the kitchen, Ollie made my heart happy when he repositioned himself on the couch, got comfy, and watched the game with the same look on his face and concentration that I can only imagine I had.

I used a couple of different captions when I posted the photo online.

1. “Left the room and Ollie got super comfy on the couch to watch Blue Jays spring training baseball.

There’s not a single piece of my heart that this image doesn’t make happy.

I love everything about it. Even the mess.”

2. “A little boy, comfy on the couch watching baseball like his daddy does and his grandpa did and his great grampy did before that.”

There’s not a single word I didn’t mean in either one of them. I do love everything about the photo. We played in the morning and we played during the game, so there are toys on the floor and a book on the couch and the rug is a little wrinkled.

The second one is my heart. I do love to get comfortable and watch a baseball game. It makes me happy. My dad did the same thing, and I sat with him for who knows how many hours watching the Blue Jays. And we both learned it from my grampy who sat and watched and quietly dissected the game and kept his own record of home runs hit by Blue Jays players on a piece of paper on a clipboard (he did the same thing for Maple Leafs player goals during the hockey season). In my eyes, Ollie is part of the fourth generation to catch the baseball bug and have the Blue Jays in front of his eyes. And he’s part of the first generation, along with his cousins, that neither my dad or gramp got to see and teach themselves.

It’s just a picture, taken in the middle of a means nothing game in February. But it’s a whole lot more than that to me.

But I promise, with a little bit of my own style thrown in, I’m going to do my best to keep our tradition alive.

Baseball is back, baby. And while it’s only spring training, and there’s a long season ahead of us, it’s nice to start the cycle over again.