(EDITOR’S NOTE - Times News sports writer Rich Strack is attending spring training games in Florida this week. He will be writing about his experiences attending the games, while also sharing his thoughts and memories as someone who has been a devoted baseball fan for over a half century. Today, in part 1 of a 3-part feature, we get to experience what a day at the stadium means to the fans in attendance and what it could mean to the players on the field.)

By Rich Strack

tnsports@tnonline.com

“The one constant through all the years … has been baseball. America has rolled like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”

These are the iconic words of James Earl Jones from the movie, “Field of Dreams.”

No other sport marks the coming of one of the four seasons like baseball does - something that has been happening ever since the Cincinnati Red Stockings began preparing for their first professional baseball game in 1869.

It’s spring training in Port St. Lucie. Florida. I sat in the second deck along the third base line at Clover Park, the pre-season home of the New York Metropolitans. The skies above were a cloudy gray on a 75-degree afternoon, but the diamond glittered below with its emerald green grass surrounded by a golden track of circular base paths.

Before the game, decorated veterans of the Vietnam War and a widow of a soldier who died in Afghanistan for his country threw out the first balls. Then a young man brought tears to my eyes with a resounding singing of our National Anthem.

As the first batter for the Detroit Tigers stepped into the batter’s box, a 10-year-old boy named Drew stood alongside the Mets dugout and shouted, “Play ball!”

I sat back relaxing with a hot dog and a beer and my favorite gal, an absolute necessary combination for watching a baseball game. I struck up a conversation with a man named Joe seated next to me. Joe is the epitome of a true baseball fan. He left Willow Grove, Pennsylvania at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning and drove to Port St Lucie to see three Mets spring training games. Along the way, his car broke down and needed repair. He checked into his hotel at 11 p.m. Saturday.

None of that mattered to him today when he looked across the field and saw his New York team trot onto their defensive positions. We talked Mets baseball every inning. His favorite player for the Orange and Blue was John Milner, who played seven years with the Mets in the 1970s, a curious choice considering all the greats the Mets have had in their history.

“Nobody hit line drives harder than Milner,” he said.

We watched Francisco Lindor run out a routine fly ball and when it was caught, he was three feet from second base.

“That was Gary Carter, too,” said Joe. “He always ran every out as hard as he could.”

For the players, the Grapefruit League means something different depending upon their status with their teams. All Star, Ronald Acuna Jr. of the Atlanta Braves once said, “To me, every spring training and every time I’m out there, I’m trying to earn a job.”

I cannot begin to realize the anxieties inside these young men during their performances on this field today. Minor leaguers, so close to getting to the Show, know that every swing of the bat, each pitch of the ball, and any glove of a Baltimore chop ground ball can determine if they fly on the team plane as a member of the 40-player roster for opening day of the Major League season or go back to long bus rides, cheap hotels, and bad food down on the farm.

Then there are veterans with guaranteed roster spots fine tuning their arms and swings in the spring, but each team has somebody like 33-year-old Luke Voit trying to prove he still belongs in the Bigs with his once lethal bat that has struck many a home run in eight seasons of yesteryears. Voit knows the odds. Going back to the minors for him would be playing baseball with kids who weren’t yet born when he was in high school. The options are extreme. Earn the Mets pinstripes and go North with the team or get the dreaded DFA (designated for assignment) tag, which just might send him home to give up the game that’s been running through his veins since he played in the Little League.

There is no other sound so sweet to my ears than the crack of the bat to a baseball, that same sound that seasons long ago, were heard by fans of Ty Cobb and the Babe. The crack of the sweet spot on the barrel of the bat came from Mark Vientos in the second inning when he went yard over the right field wall to give the Mets the lead.

On the mound, the home team’s starting pitcher, Adrian Houser threw three perfect innings. As they say, hope springs eternal, perhaps more so for the Mets fan who’s had his heart broken from unfulfilled expectations for more years than he wants to count.

Blue skies hovered over Clover Park for the final three innings of a game the Mets eventually dropped, 3-2. But that didn’t change the mood of the fans. From the young families to the aging men and women - many of them transplants from the Northeast who now live in Florida - no one really cares who wins or loses these exhibition games.

It’s the extraordinary aura they covet. James Earl Jones said. “They’ll watch the game as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.”

For fans, the world outside spring training parks does not exist. That’s why baseball is America’s favorite pastime.

(Part 1 of 3)