The billionaire baseball owners are very fortunate in one respect: Their mission to destroy the former national pastime is overshadowed by Vladimir Putin’s mission to commit mass murder. We fans – or, increasingly, we former fans – feel a tad silly fulminating about a lost spring training at a time when innocents are being decimated. So I self-medicate by dreaming backwards in time, back to when the sport romanced my adolescent heart. I’m sure I’m not alone feeling this way. Paul Simon once wrote, “Preserve your memories / They’re all that’s left you.” Mine exist in a bubble, like the first intimations of love, and the soul-sucking horrors of 2022 can’t pierce it.

Random moments are now indelible. It was 60 years ago this month when I nurtured my nascent passion, turning the knob on an ancient wooden radio in the successful search for static-ridden spring training games from mysterious faraway lands like “St. Petersburg” and “Scottsdale.” In April, the endearingly awful Mets and bowlegged Casey Stengel debuted on my TV in glorious black and white from the moldering Polo Grounds; in May, my friend Mark taught me how to field grounders so that I could partake in the pickup games played on neighborhood sandlots (the sites of future houses) where we boys came to bat mimicking Yaz or The Mick; in August, in the kitchen of a rented beach house, with my pet turtle lolling in its plastic paradise, I studied the box scores with the fervor of a Talmudic scholar, and saw in a headline that Tony Kubek was leaving the Army in time for the Yankee pennant drive; in October, after Willie McCovey lined to Bobby Richardson for the final out of the World Series (which happened in daylight; we kids could see the final innings!), I sat in the shrubs below my bedroom window, told myself it’d been a great season, and wondered when the spring would ever come. Yes indeed, when you’re touched by the game as a kid – at least as a kid in my era, when baseball was still the national pastime – it is romance, legend, and the stuff of dreams.

Fast forward 60 years.

I have tickets for a ’22 Phillies game on April 23 – with my grandkids in tow – but I’m stumped on whether it will happen. To stay abreast of developments, I suppose I should immerse myself in the fog of factoids about salary caps luxury taxes playoff revenues wage minimums bonus pools revenue sharing salary arbitration uniform sponsorships payroll floor free agent blah blah blah…but no. Whenever I spy a lockout story I glide through those paragraphs at the speed of light and search in vain for the bottom line: Are they gonna play ball or what?

At this point, Merrick Garland might even indict a traitor before I – we – get an answer.

Look, I’m well aware that the game has always been a business – there was labor unrest back in 1890 – and know first hand that most players up close are by no means mythic in stature; during my one season as a baseball beat writer, the off-the-record locker room talk about women was nothing you’d ever hear in a Ken Burns doc. So I suppose it’s naïve to expect that in our current dire straits – with the Russians strafing a nuclear plant, with 1700 dead each day from Covid, and with a neo-fascist cult plotting to destroy our democracy – that there would be at least one renewable pleasure in this life, at least one surviving institutional certitude. I guess that’s too much to ask.

What do the owners want from us – blind fealty? Maybe I should promise in advance to stay sentient during the endless strikeouts and four-hour games. Maybe I should promise to worship the launch-angle swing and the unfathomable stats like WAR and OPS+. Maybe I should even promise to indulge the owners’ boundless hunger for more and more revenue-rich playoff games, which lumber deep into the night while east coast kids are tucked away.

Actually, I refuse to promise anything. All I want is a chance to view the pristine greensward through the prism of my grankids’ baby blues, but why should I grovel for anything? What did we do to deserve this desecration?

I’m tempted to just sell my April tickets or seek a refund – anything but play the sucker and wait for a verdict from the game’s selfish stewards. To borrow a slang verb coined by Norman Mailer, they can all go fug themselves.

I’ll just dwell in the realm of memory – like the first time my little legs delivered me to the top of a ramp and there was a field in high-definition color, in a rickety minor league park that later burned down, but on that night was tantamount to the Taj Mahal; or like the first time I ever saw a big league homer in person (Roger Maris); or the way I’d watch a TV game wearing a kid-sized Milwaukee Braves uniform (very un-PC, I liked the tomahawk); or the time I saw Harmon Killebrew crush a ball over the Fenway barrie above the center-field bleachers (which I recalled for him when we met decades later, and, ever the nice Nebraskan, he was polite enough to feign the memory); or the way, circa ’67, that I modeled my backyard pitching motion after Sox ace Jim Lonborg’s. I still throw like that when I play catch with the grands.

But my young-uns wouldn’t care a whit if there’s no season; they’re already pre-alienated and pre-distracted from the plethora of alternative sports and pleasures. And as for me, I can always console myself with YouTube. At the flick of a finger, there’s even a 70-year-old World Series game from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The batters stay in the box and await the next pitch; the pitchers, with no 60-second fretting and futzing, throw the fricking ball. Jackie runs, Pee Wee bunts, Gillette sells its razor blades, and the sweet whimsy of childhood never dies.