There are few words that can stir a man out of the doldrums as winter as well as these four: Pitchers and catchers report.

It means baseball is just around the corner. It means the dark and the cold is almost over. As sure a sign as the swallows returning to Capistrano, baseball marks the return of spring. A rebirth, if you will.

Yes, I love college football, but baseball is a boy's first love, especially if you're from my generation or earlier, from the days of B.C. (before cable) when sports on television was relegated to Saturday or Sunday afternoon and there were no 24-hour, all-sports channels.

To follow baseball, you turned to the newspaper box scores or, if you were lucky in Southwest Georgia, a static-filled, far-off radio signal.

As a child, I struggled with math. That's probably one reason I ended up in the profession I'm in. Long division and fractions were impossible to understand. Yet I could calculate Hank Aaron's batting average or Phil Niekro's earned-run average with ease.

I attended my first baseball game of the year Saturday, to watch my nephew, Tyler, and his high school team. What a glorious way to spend an afternoon. A bag of peanuts in one hand, a cold drink in the other and America's game in front of me. At a baseball game, I'm able to sit back and soak in the whole environment, something I can't do when Georgia is second-and-goal on the Auburn 2 with 30 seconds left in the game.

I have left one Georgia football game early, the 1995 Georgia-Florida game. I left it early not because Georgia was being embarrassed by the Evil Genius and his Florida Gators, but because Game 5 of the
World Series was about to start and we wanted to be in front of a TV to see the Braves win a world championship.

In the great baseball movie "Bull Durham," the manager explains the game to his players thusly: "It's a simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball." That's right before he calls them "lollygaggers" for not grasping that concept.

It's a game of brains and of skill. Being the biggest guy on the team doesn't make you the best guy on the team. Even the smallest player, with the right skills, can be David against the league's Goliaths.

Sadly, there are those out there who don't like baseball. They say it's boring. I feel sorry for these people, because at any given time in a game they are missing out on finely tuned battles: the pitcher vs. the catcher, the fielder vs. the ball, manager vs. manager, players vs. slumps.

It's a game of nuance. Once you understand the concept of the hit-and-run, the difference between a fast ball and a curve or why it's important to throw strikes early in the count, the game really comes alive.

I remember the first time I went to a major-league ballpark, old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, to see the Braves play the St. Louis Cardinals. I remember how vivid the colors were, so much more alive than the little league fields we played on back home. The grass was greener, the infield dirt redder and the line whiter. I still feel that way about big league parks today.

Every year, football releases a catalog of new rules, designed to make the game better in some way. But baseball doesn't do that because it's already the perfect game. It is essentially the same as it always has been, the designated hitter, aluminum bats and the wild card notwithstanding.

Of course, major league baseball has taken a credibility hit in the last year or so, thanks to the steroid scandal that seemingly has consumed the game and, now, Congress. (What is it about politicians who think they can solve everything by holding hearings and launching investigations?)

But there are plenty of places you can see the game in its purest sense. Few things are more fun than watching kids playing baseball as they strive to understand those nuances and subtleties of the game. I'll spend many spring afternoons watching Tyler and his team.

As James Earl Jones' Terence Mann tells Kevin Costner's Ray Kinsella in the great movie "Field of Dreams": "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again."

Amen. Play ball.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays in The Times. Read previous columns online at gainesvilletimes.com. Originally published March 2, 2008.