Off-Season Baseball Deprivation Syndrome

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring." (Rogers Hornsby)

What can the avid baseball fan do in the off-season to stave off the dreaded baseball-deprivation blues?

Some suggestions:

1. Listen to a lot of baseball music: Download it to your iPod, listen to it online, buy CDs and play them, whistle them while you work, break out into raucous renditions of them in inappropriate places. I've compiled a list, in the left-hand navigation bar here at SimmonsField.com, of links to baseball music sources online, many of them being various versions of Take Me Out to the Ballgame. My personal favorite is the mellow mandolin version.
   
   
2. Lurk on Internet message boards: When you're mourning the loss of baseball, you can find similar distraught souls online. Many online baseball boards completely ignore College Baseball. But there are some places where fans of the college game congregate. CollegeBaseball.Rivals.com is one of the most active gatherings of like-minded fans. For talk with other Mizzou Baseball fans, the Tigerboard.com All Sports Board has some discussion in the off-season, as does PowerMizzou.com (on the subscription-only boards). Or you can go over to the PhogNet baseball board and interrupt their obsession with the Royals long enough to stir up the MU-KU rivalry a bit.
   
   
3. Memorize the rules: Download the official NCAA Baseball Rules of the Game and memorize them. It'll come in handy for message board arguments and for heckling the umpires. And if you have questions, ask them on the NCAA Baseball Rules Message Board.
   
   
4. Do some advance preparation for heckling: Start by reading some of the best heckles at HeckleDepot.com. ("How'd you get a square head in that round mask?"). If you're really ambitious, go to MySpace.com and see if you can find any unprotected pages of key players from our upcoming opponents.
   
   
5. Take a trip in the WayBack machine: Here on SimmonsField.com we have a lot of information about Mizzou Baseball History. Of special interest is a day-by-day detailed re-creation of the Missouri Tigers' 1954 World Championship Season. Reading through the whole season from start to finish will not only be educational but a pick-up from the off-season blues.
   
   
6. Pass the time seeing how some creative fans of America's Pastime are passing their time online: In the left-hand navigation bar here at SimmonsField.com is a list of links called Fan Fun. Many of these websites contained a veritable can of cornucopia of baseball imaginings. A favorite of mine is the Cosmic Baseball Association, which Nuke Laloosh would describe as "really out there."
   
   

   "Frank Zappa played cosmic baseball for three seasons as an outfielder for the
   Delta Dragons and the Paradise Pisces. He retired in 1988. He is currently the
   owner of the Franklinton Zappas which play in CBA's Underleague."

7. The annual baseball movie marathon: Speaking of Nuke Laloosh, watching a bunch of baseball movies is a great cure for the off-season blues. I have a drawer full of baseball movies, some of them great, others tolerable only because they're about baseball. You might have to actually go to your local video store and rent them. Set apart a weekend - or a week - and go through your stack of movies one after the other. My Top 9 lineup, in no particular order:
   

   The Kevin Costner trilogy: Bull Durham, Field of Dreams & For Love of the Game (in which a current Big 12 head coach plays a small role as the Yankee manager); A League of Their Own, The Natural, The Sandlot, Eight Men Out, , Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, Pastime. Or find the Baseball series by Ken Burns and watch the whole things straight through (many libraries, including the Columbia Public Library, have it available for check-out)

8. Read some baseball books: My Top 9 lineup, in no particular order (more or less): Hornsby Hit One Over My Head, by David Cataneo (definitely the star of my baseball bookshelf); Moneyball, by Michael Lewis; The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, by Bill James; Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof; Sholess Joe , by W.P. Kinsella; The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence S. Ritter; Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball, by Mark Ribowsky; Baseball: A Literary Anthology, by Nicholas Dawidoff; and, if you can find them used or at a library, the out-of-print Fireside Books of Baseball, by Charles Einstein.
   
   
9. Start your own website or blog about college baseball: Worked for me.

There is no #10. This is baseball. 9 is the magic number.