Normally, this is my favorite time of the year. So, we’re going to take a break from our Fountain Hills History Lesson series and talk about two things close to my heart.

The college basketball championships for men and women, called “March Madness,” get underway this week. The upsets of high-ranked teams by small school programs are where the madness comes from.

For 25 years, I enjoyed watching spring training baseball from two seats behind the San Francisco Giants’ dugout with my buddies Charlie Vascellaro and Mike Petrone.

Charlie is a walking encyclopedia of baseball and probably has every book written on the subject in his personal library in his apartment in Baltimore.

Three of the books were

written by Charlie, including a biography of Hank Aaron.

You see, he makes a living as a nationally recognized baseball writer. I am proud of his accomplishments. His first job was with The Times, covering sports while he was attending ASU in pursuit of a journalism degree.

After graduation, he went to work for Diamond magazine, where he became a freelance baseball and travel writer. His stories have appeared in many airline magazines and such newspapers as The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

A couple of weeks ago, he had a Page 1 story in The Village Voice, a New York City newspaper. The story was about the city welcoming back Buck Showalter. The former Yankee manager willbegin managing the New York Mets once play resumes. As most of you know by now, Major League Baseball is in a lockout position by the owners. The owners call a Competitive Balance Tax, what the players believe is a de facto salary cap.

Charlie calls this mess a battle between the billionaire owners versus the millionaire players. No matter how you look at it, this game called baseball and its fans are the real losers.

We have already lost all of spring training and at least some of the regular-season games.

So, with that said, Charlie and I won’t be enjoying this year’s Cactus League games, the close-up views and sounds of the Giants players from our seats in the second row of section 210.

You may have wondered how we got such good seats. Charlie gets credit for that. He was friends with a Bay area sportswriter named Bernie Esser, who was a friend of Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham. Bernie always got the first selection of game tickets. Then Charlie, Mike and I shared the rest.

Then about 15 years ago, Bernie came down with a disease that deteriorated his eyesight. He got to the point where he couldn’t attend games, so he turned over the tickets each spring to his daughter, Barie. She generally used about 10 tickets each year, coming here from the Bay area with her family.

Those two tickets originally cost us $8 each. The price this year was approaching $100 for each seat.

I remember how Mike raised his eyebrows when the highest-priced tickets started selling for $35 each about six years ago.

Mike passed away in 2019. I can just hear what the former Marine fighter pilot and outstanding Fountain Hills volunteer would have said about those ticket prices now.