The Changing of the Gnomes

Pitchers and catchers have reported, so tradition demands we mark the time

Hidden since defeat at the hands of San Diego in October, the gnome has returned.

I have grown weary of football.

College or the pro, it doesn’t matter anymore. Time was, to everything there was a season. But now, football never leaves us, and by the time the NFL wrapped things up eight days ago with an admittedly entertaining Super Bowl, it was more than enough.

Not that those whose paychecks rely on ramming a steady diet of football down the throats of American television viewers as if we were waterfowl condemned to live for nothing more than to produce foie gras seem to care. Over one lunch hour I had the misfortune of sitting beneath a 60-inch widescreen TV tuned to the NFL Network just 48 hours after the Chiefs had defeated the Eagles. The talk was about free agency, and while the opinions were delivered with urgency, I could not be made to care. And this past weekend, the XFL returned after a COVID-19-induced hiatus, to be followed later this year by a second season of the updated version of the USFL.

The USFL: football’s answer to a question no one was asking.

Granted, 15-year old Eric would have been overjoyed by such an embarrassment of football riches. I loved USFL version 1.0 and fantasized of seeing NFL owners once again be forced to merge with an upstart league. But for a man well into middle age, football without a break is exhausting. It’s been almost two centuries since a poet first told us that “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” But how can you miss football when it won’t go away?

Yes, I’m self-aware.

The echo of training camp in the waning days of Summer makes sense. The return, in earnest, of the college and pro game the weekend after Labor Day makes sense. The culmination of the college season on January 1st made sense. By contrast, playing a college championship game on a Monday night in January with Christmas and New Year’s in the rearview mirror feels like an unwarranted indulgence. So does the 17th week of the NFL’s regular season and a playoff bracket expanded to include almost half of the teams in the league. And with the Super Bowl now landing on the calendar later than Groundhog Day and kickoff creeping ever closer to Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to mentally prepare myself for the day the “Big Game,” interrupts dinner on Easter Sunday.

But baseball still makes sense. No, I’m not the first to note that the return of the game in time for Spring matches the rhythm of the season, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And since I’ve gotten married, my wife and I have started our own tradition to mark the changing of the sporting seasons. We have four gnomes: two for the Caps and one each for the Jets and the Mets. But no one stays in the garden forever. They appear in conjunction, more or less, with the first day of training camp, and disappear somewhere between elimination from playoff contention and the end of the season.

The Caps gnomes have been sharing space in a flower pot at the end of our walk since Labor Day 2022. The Jets gnome had been standing guard in a pot parallel on the other side of the walk since mid-August, but was banished to the basement before the start of the NFL playoffs. I’m seriously considering letting him rot there forever and replacing him with a Pittsburgh Steelers gnome in honor of my wife’s loyalty to the Terrible Towel and Steel Curtain.

But with pitchers and catcher reporting last week and position players arriving in Port St. Lucie on Monday, the Mets gnome has returned from the darkness of the basement. That’s where it has languished since the team’s bats fell mostly silent during a best of three playoff series at home versus the Padres in October. Combined with a late fade that allowed the Atlanta Braves to seize the NL East, it all took a serious edge off of the second most successful regular season in team history.

Since then, the richest owner in baseball has opened his wallet to rebuild a pitching staff denuded by free agency. Gone are Jake deGrom, Taijuan Walker and Chris Bassitt. They’ve been replaced by Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga and Jose’ Quintana. There are some new faces in the bullpen, but not many new bats to supplement a lineup that had more and more trouble scoring as last season wore on.

Hopes are high in Flushing, and mine are as well, though I’m beginning to detect a touch of “irrational exuberance.” I’ll have more to say once my old friend William F. Yurasko invites me back to talk Mets sometime in April. Until then, indulge in ice hockey, college basketball and the NBA. Baseball still returns when the time is right.

Eric McErlain lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. He blogged at Off Wing Opinion regularly from 2002-2009. In addition to writing at Off Wing, his work has appeared at The Sporting News, AOL FanHouse, NBC Sports.com, Deadspin, The Hockey Writers and Pro Football Weekly.