IVR

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes here in the Northeast we’re blessed with a warm day in late February or early March that reminds us of what T.S. Eliot once called “the cruellest month”:

 

 

Eventually those words, the opening lines of 1922’s “The Waste Land,” will have described 29 of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams, as April signifies the start of a long season that, for fans of the national pastime, will end in disinterest (Kansas City Royals), agony (New York Mets), disappointment (New York Yankees) or heartache (Boston Red Sox).

 

On the other hand, each of those teams has won a World Series in the past 25 years, and – with revenue-sharing, injuries, breakout seasons, dumb luck, astrology and God’s will – each of those 30 teams has a chance to win U.S. professional sports’ highest prize when, in April, the season begins.

 

The 2009 campaign starts at 8 p.m. on Sunday, April 5, when the Atlanta Braves take on the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies.

 

Naturally, there’s a lot of build-up to Opening Day.

 

Many of us are anticipating Sports Illustrated’s 2009 baseball preview issue, or the complete 2009 Topps baseball card series.

 

Suddenly Harold Reynolds is back on TV, on the “MLB Network,” a brilliant new channel that will vie with ESPN’s (News - Alert) “Baseball Tonight” for advertising dollars and fans’ attention. Throw those two programs on top of ESPN’s “Sportscenter,” ESPN News, each local team’s cable network and the sports segment at the end of a regular news broadcast, and you’ve got a baseball-saturated television set.

 

On the Internet we’ve got beat writers from our favorite newspapers, blogs, Web sites, and e-mail threads with colleagues.

 

And all of that before the season has started.

 

The baseball fan, on the eve of a baseball season, echoes Rolling Stone’s front man Mick Jagger in 1971’s “Bitch”: “I salivate like a Pavlov dog.”

 

What to do in the intervening weeks?

 

Now, historians of the game know this: Baseball has always had a hard time getting out of its own way. Since it developed from two British sports – rounders and cricket – and especially since the 1850s, just before the Civil War, when baseball became a professional sport, our national pastime has constantly threatened itself: segregation, gambling, drugs, strikes, the reserve clause, collusion, and now steroids.

 

A friend of mine recently posted a Facebook (News - Alert) status update that read: “Mary is taking a poll to find out what you’re most sick of: steroids, the economy or Michael Phelps’ smoking pot.”

 
How about all three, Mary, plus Travis, the chimpanzee who attacked his owner’s friend?

 

New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez’s recent admission – though sketchy in its detail – that he was injected with steroids from 2001 to 2003, has emerged as this off-season’s major story. It’s bigger than the story about A-Rod’s fallout with Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, bigger than his carousing with women other than his (now ex) wife, including Madonna, and bigger than revelations made by former Bronx Bombers skipper Joe Torre about Rodriguez’s position in the top-secret Yankees clubhouse.

 

Even during this season, we know – while beleaguered baseball greats Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens face felony charges for lying about their own performance-enhancing drug use – A-Rod will be peppered incessantly with questions about what he did and why. Adding fuel to the fire, the names of 103 other players, who reportedly failed the same drug test as A-Rod, have not yet emerged.

 

There are only two cures for the baseball fan: time and, well, baseball.

 

We’re itching for the season to get underway, and when it does, many of us will be glued to our TV sets and computers. We’ve already talked about all the baseball outlets through those media.

 

But when you’re not near a TV set or a computer, options are limited. There’s “Tell Me” (1-800-555-5535), which provides relatively up-to-date scores through an interactive voice response, or “IVR” system.

 

Even better – for those of you with iPhones and iPod Touches, there’s Bluefish Wireless’ “Live Sportz – MLB” application, shown at left. The free application, released last July, allows users to see live play-by-play updates of any major league game. The graphical description shows all the fielders and runners in their positions, an updated ball/strike count, the score and the last play made.

 

Similar to ESPN’s “GameCast,” the application saw a few glitches when it debuted mid-season last year, but since has garnered considerable praise.

 

“No other app on iPhone (News - Alert) displays the game in this type of format, which is not only easy to read and understand, but includes loads of information,” one user writes. “Additionally, the fact that it updates itself after every pitch is very, very good. Plus, it’s free!”

 

That’s a magic word, especially in this slower economy. (Not that the New York Yankees have noticed).

 

When I went to open the application just now, I got this message: “No games today.”

 

As a rabid baseball fan, even those three words make me salivate. It means that some day – and some day soon – there will be baseball.

 

It reminds me that T.S. Eliot’s characterization of April in “The Waste Land” is based on a much earlier work, Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14^th century “The Canterbury Tales,” whose prologue includes these lines:

 

 

Or, translated:

 

 

Play ball.