Baseball is back!

“Baseball is Heaven’s gift to mortals.” —George Will

Spring is in the air (except for some snow lingering on the ground around Lake Tahoe that prevents a “spring cleanup” in the yard), so we’ve been enjoying watching the baseball season get underway — sometimes at dinnertime with our proverbial “TV trays” (a throwback to the ’50s — kind of like us).

Our TV service allows us to watch out-of-market games, so we can watch the Dodgers from Los Angeles (where we grew up) and the Orioles from Baltimore (where our son goes to college at Johns Hopkins), not just the Giants.

We are hardly diehard Pittsburg Pirates fans, but it is not lost on us that the team’s owners now own the newspaper chain of The Union and Sierra-Sun. That’s cool. So we’ll watch a game or two for old times’ sake.

It’s hard to keep up with the MLB ownership changes. “The family of real estate magnate Ted Lerner, which 16 years ago purchased the Washington Nationals from Major League Baseball and oversaw a rebuilding process that eventually resulted in a World Series championship, has begun the process of exploring potential changes in the club’s ownership structure, including the possibility of selling the team,” as the Washington Post is reporting this week.

It’s no surprise that baseball is big business. And “Moneyball” (a primer is here) has made the game decidedly less romantic. The book is a must-read for baseball fans.

We still get excited at the first pitch of the season, and this spring was no exception.

We’ll catch a Giants’ game at AT&T Park in San Francisco, and we hope to see an Orioles game at Camden Yards when we visit our son in Baltimore. The two downtown ballparks are similar, and the architecture firm HOK Sport (now Populous) built both of them.

As George Will also wrote: “Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season–these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?”