64 Days to Opening Day

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 64 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson. This is a book about the Peloponnesian War, the war between Sparta and Athens.

Later in the war Alcibiades would exhibit a strong desire for the offensive, perhaps as a reaction to the senseless war of attrition in Attica that marked his first years of service. Some eighteen years after the Spartans first marched out to cut down the trees of Attica, a much older and by then treasonous thirty-seven-year-old Alcibiades, ensconced in Sparta, would advise his former enemies that such annual incursions were no way to wreck his homeland. Better, he told his new hosts, to create a permanent fort, thirteen miles from the walls of Athens at Decelea, and thus destroy Alcibiades’ own native soil year-round.

But all that was well into the future. For now, the teenager rode into battle against ravagers full of zeal and hope, confident after the first year’s assault that Attca had taken the best punch Sparta could offer – scarcely aware that both his country’s and his own greatest tragedies lay just months ahead.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.