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By Tom Verducci

In his five days as a major leaguer, the author saw the splendors of baseball -- and its hard reality -- from the best perspective: inside the game

Standing in leftfield during a major league game -- I am playing leftfield -- heightens my very sense of being. There is a vibrancy to the colors and sensations around me that, even as I stand there, I am cataloging in my most secure vault of memory. I can feel the tips of my metal spikes knifing between blades of grass and into the soft, moist earth. I feel the fit and drape of my uniform, a major league uniform, my amazing technicolor dreamcoat. Gray pants, belted tightly, black-mesh jersey with toronto in metallic silver above the stylized Blue Jays logo on the left breast and a shimmering silver No. 2 on my back. Never can I remember the sky bluer, the grass greener, the sun brighter.

It is not an out-of-body experience but rather its opposite: a saturation of sensations. With a change in perspective, the familiar becomes intensely intimate, like actually standing on the blue carpet of the Oval Office or feeling the floorboards of the Carnegie Hall stage beneath your feet or leaving footprints upon the Sea of Tranquility.

It is also a little like transporting dynamite on your person. A feeling of power, yes, but with a constant undercurrent of danger, especially knowing that Blue Jays first baseman Eric Hinske, who keeps fouling off pitches like a finicky shopper picking through unripe fruit, could at any moment send a curving line drive screaming my way or, worse, loft a fiendish high fly into that bright, cloudless sky and cruel cross-field wind, leaving me to look as if I were chasing a dollar bill dropped from a helicopter.

This is where the long march of a baseball season begins. A team will play upward of 200 games before the curtain falls on the World Series. This is the first for Toronto, an intrasquad game. About 2,000 fans -- nearly all of whom, to my dismay as I try to track pitches from leftfield, are wearing gleaming white shirts -- ring the backstop of Field 2 at the Bobby Mattick Training Center in Dunedin, Fla., drawn, after a winter of scraping snow shovels against the driveway, by those two lovely words: game today.

I am a sportswriter, and sportswriters belong on the other side of the fence with the other unchosen. So why in the name of Kafka is a sportswriter playing leftfield for the Blue Jays? Maybe Kafka, not always the surrealist, can explain. On Oct. 18, 1921, three years before he died at age 40, Kafka cracked open his diary and wrote this entry: "Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off.... If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come."

I have come to Dunedin to summon it. Beginning with the team's first full-squad workout on Feb. 25, I have spent five days as a full-fledged player, in spirit and in uniform -- attending every private meeting, running every sprint, participating in every live batting-practice session, sharing every clubhouse joke. "The full metal jacket," as manager John Gibbons promised me.

My most modest goals were to make it through five days with my bats and my hamstrings intact. My greater goals were to learn about the game up close, in the first person rather than in the third, about how spring training begins to lay the mortar for the sacred brotherhood of teammates -- and about myself.

Five days a Jay, standing there with the vastness of leftfield my responsibility, my head is crammed with newfound knowledge. I've heard the ferocious hum of a 95-mph fastball, taken more than 100 swings a day, been hit by a pitch and heard grown men admonished for not washing their hands after using the bathroom.

Now it is about to end. I will get one at-bat in this intrasquad game. One chance at splendor.

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