by Bob Duden

Created on: December 10, 2010   Last Updated: December 11, 2010

No one is allergic to Spring.  There might be some allergies caused by the various pollens that pop up from spring times resurgent plant growth but, spring fever isn't one of them.  There is a theory that in Spring a young boy's fancy turns to thoughts of love.  Wide eyed and bushy tailed they chase the elusive dream having been pierced by Cupid's arrow.  This phenomenon is often referred to as spring fever.  The heart wants what the heart wants and all focus is pointed toward the opposite sex.  Chores are abandoned, work slows down and school books are put aside because love is in the air.  However, reality might be just a little bit different.   In springtime, a young boy's fancy turns to thoughts of - baseball.  Love just might have been the colloquial answer, the easy answer but, it happens every spring, spring fever brings opening day on the baseball fields of America.  Spring fever means baseball, and baseball means the bleak and dreary winter has come to a close.

The countdown to Spring begins in early February.  The sports pages all across America start talking about how many days until pitchers and catchers arrive at the spring training facilities of the major league baseball teams.  Football and the Super Bowl are fast becoming distant memories.  The NCAA BCS college football champion was crowned in January and the memories of all those bowl games have faded with the holiday season.  Christmas and New Year have passed and the weather has deteriorated into ice and gloom.  Basketball and hockey are in full swing but, they are played indoors, away from the sleet and snow and frigid icy blasts of winter's chill.  The interminable winter has dragged on into the phenomenon that is loosely called cabin fever.  We are shut in, staring at four walls and looking through the window panes at a barren landscape devoid of life.  The first buds on the oaks and maples are still a month away but, the hot stove league is heating up.  They are talking baseball, and that means Spring is just around the corner.

Spring has sprung when that first pitch is thrown.  The grass is always greener on the ball fields of the South when Winter has yet to release it's icy grip up North.  We anticipate the change and follow it's climb back North.  The first buds of new growth on the plants means the time has come.  Lawns start to lose their Winter brown, and that green grass coincides with a feeling that wells up from deep in everyones soul, a feeling that starts with the first warm rays of the sun.  It's a feeling that defies explanation but, it arrives none the less every year, and it always seems to arrive with baseball.  Spring fever is the rebirth of the soul.  The tedium and boredom of Winter have passed and been replaced by a fervent hope, nay an eternal hope that life is renewed.  Spring fever exists in every man.  It is the time when the pessimism of Winter turns into the optimism of Spring, and no one is allergic to that.      

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