Middlebury College baseball coach Mike Leonard allows me, a baseball alum, longtime faculty/staff member at the college, and a lifelong fan of the game, to say a few words to the team at an early indoor practice. I’m grateful for that.

My brief remarks are a version of the old “play hard, have fun” message: I remind them to appreciate one another as teammates and the opportunity to compete intensely, to live in the moment, playing in this great game.

As I was driving in that morning, thinking about what I might say, a memory of Old Mister Whittingham popped into my head.

When I was a kid playing high school baseball in Lewiston, Maine, Old Mister Whittingham often came to our practices and games. That’s what we always called him, “Old Mister Whittingham.”

He was a familiar presence, standing on the sidelines, apparently quite content, enjoying baseball and our exuberant play in springtime. We liked him there. We would wave or say hello and he would return our greeting.

We lived in the same neighborhood, he and I, and I would see him walking now and then, a heavy-set man in a ball cap in a winter coat even on warm spring days. Our conversations were pleasant, if perfunctory, an old man and a teenager.

I do remember one encounter in particular. In the tenth grade, jayvee baseball, I hit a home run in a game, a rare occurrence as it turned out. The ball went over the fence in left field, and hit off the back wall of the Armory, the building adjacent to the field.

Old Mister Whittingham told me after the game that it reminded him of the balls Bobby Flynn used to bang off the Armory wall when he was a player at LHS. That remark had me floating on air for weeks.

Bobby Flynn was my baseball coach at Lewiston High, and later both the ski and baseball coach at Bates College. He played five years in the Pittsburgh Pirates system and was a legendary local athlete — and a wonderful man.

I wrote the lines above, this bit of nostalgia, in my room at the Holiday Inn in Winter Haven, Fla., just a couple weeks ago. I was there to take in the spring break games of the Middlebury College baseball team. I told people I was “on assignment from the Addison Independent.”

From the window of my fourth-floor room, I could see the baseball fields at Chain O’Lakes Park, within walking distance, where Middlebury would play two of their games. The 7,000-seat stadium where the Red Sox played their spring training games from 1966-1999 was demolished in 2024 and replaced by a complex of baseball fields in a $20 million renovation.

I keenly remember my first time at Chain O’Lakes Park. It resides on my Bucket List, my Reverse Bucket List: experiences I have already had that are now wonderful memories.

In March of 1985, my Middlebury College classmate Jon Coffin and I took a week’s vacation from our jobs to go to Florida for MLB spring training.

Our hope, beyond immersing ourselves in baseball, was to meet Ted Williams, the hero of our youth, who in those days attended the Red Sox camp and taught hitting to the younger players (who better?)

Our goal was to get his signature on a poster of his likeness that had been Jon’s for 25 years at that time, a beautiful drawing of “Number Nine” standing in repose, leaning on his bat.

On our first day, we found Ted with a contingent of minor leaguers on one of the lower fields. When he walked off the field for a break, we approached him like nervous kids. Jon asked him to personalize the message on the poster: “Please write ‘To the Coffins.’”

“You don’t want me to do that,” he said. “This poster’s not worth anything if I write that. You can’t sell it.”

Jon was mortified at the thought. “I’m not selling it. It’s priceless to me if you sign it to my family.” So Ted wrote a personal greeting in his graceful script and Jon had his treasured family artifact, still up on the wall now in his condo in Brunswick, Maine.

I have been to spring training often since then, three other times to Winter Haven, in 1990 for the “honeymoon” of my second marriage: she’s as much of a ball fan as I — a good thing.

March is a great time to be away from Vermont. It’s such is a terrible month. The fact there is baseball in March, and it’s in warm weather, is a gift.

When I played baseball at Middlebury, eons ago, we had a spring trip, my sophomore year, and only that year. We went “south” for games in New York state (Army at West Point), Connecticut (Coast Guard and UConn) and Massachusetts (Brandeis in Boston). We lost ’em all.

I make this trek south now to watch Middlebury play against other teams from cold weather states making the same pilgrimage. I have often found the time to see some Major League games too.

This year, in Winter Haven, and nearby Davenport, the Middlebury team played Bethel University (Minn.), Augustana College (Ill.), St. Olaf’s (Minn.), Lawrence (Wis.), and ended with three games against NESCAC rival Colby College (Maine). MLB teams had already left for their home cities for the start of the regular season.

I came to Winter Haven this spring with my friend Jim. We met in formation at an Army Reserve meeting in Maine in 1968 and we have been friends ever since. He played basketball and baseball at Bates College and was a high school coach in both sports.

It’s fun for me to watch baseball with someone with his depth of knowledge of the game.

Watching these Middlebury games is my absolute favorite baseball. The baseball itself is good, competitive — it looks like baseball! You get all the sounds of the game (I know, old folks, it’s a ping not a crack of the bat now; get over it!). The players work hard to be good players, go to class, take their studies seriously.

And the hoopla is minimal.

It’s all baseball. No constant blaring noise like at the big-league parks with their giant TV screen in centerfield (the jumbotron — sounds like a dinosaur!). Even at the lower levels, there’s music between innings and every player has their walkup music.

Baseball is made for conversation. At these games in Winter Haven, I talk to the parents of players and ask them about their kids’ whole lives: what their majors are, summer jobs, future plans.

It never crossed my mind that when I got to be this age, I might be my own version of Old Mister Whittingham.

It’s OK with me.

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Karl Lindholm Ph.D. is the Emeritus Dean of Advising at Middlebury College and Assistant Professor of American Studies (retired). He can be contacted at [email protected].