Signs of spring include flowers blooming, couples walking hand-in-hand in the park and parents mercilessly yelling at Little League umpires.

That’s right, kids, it’s time for baseball and softball.

Baseball’s steroid scandal has caused a bit of a backlash for the American pastime this year, and some folks yearn for the purity of earlier eras. (Wasn’t that fixed World Series swell? Or maybe segregation?)

Seriously, people, baseball has always been as crazy as that one uncle of yours. Need proof?

Early baseball facts

* The term “base-ball” first appeared in print in England in 1744, and the sport evolved from earlier European games. In the early 1900s, sporting goods tycoon A.B. Spalding concocted a story to whitewash those origins and establish baseball as the all-American game. Abner Doubleday was credited with inventing the sport in 1839. Spalding also said Doubleday invented the Internet and hid weapons of mass destruction in his bat bag.

* Cooperstown, N.Y., where Doubleday reportedly created the first baseball diamond, is the site of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The New York Times reported Doubleday might have never actually set foot in Cooperstown.

* Baseball soared in popularity during the Civil War — Doubleday was a Union soldier, by the way — because troops played it to fight off boredom.

* In the 1890s, Irish- and German-Americans were so prominent in pro baseball that some people wondered if they had a genetic disposition for the game.

More recent wackiness

* Baseball teaches kids many wondrous phrases, and errors can be valuable. Billy Ripken’s 1989 Fleer card — an obscenity is scribbled on the bottom of his bat, and this somehow made it through the company’s production process — is listed at $100 on one Web site.

* New York Mets outfielder Moises Alou, who doesn’t use batting gloves, admitted in an interview that he urinated on his hands to toughen his skin. Alou is a career .300 hitter, but his high-five percentage dropped to .150 after the article, with most teammates preferring the “elbow bash.”

* Orioles player Melvin Mora was ejected during a rain delay last year for arguing with umpires that the game should have been stopped with Baltimore ahead, not after the Yankees got the lead.

Words to the wise

Philosophy has Aristotle and Socrates. Baseball has Yogi Berra, the former Yankees catcher. Here are tidbits of his wisdom.

* “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.”

* “He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”

* “I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?”

• “Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.”

— Compiled by reporter Kyle Odegard, a banjo-swinging Detroit Tigers fan. Information from Baseball Almanac, Wikipedia, ESPN, Encyclopedia Britannica and other online sources