Tinges of warm breezes and increasingly delayed sunsets might tell you. For the literal, the calendar offers a good indication.

But for those warmed by the hot stoves of winter, four words indicate spring – “pitchers and catchers report.”

Baseball’s professional ranks offer a refuge for summer recreation and a unique type of fandom different than any other sport. Maybe it’s just the flowering of seeds planted early on in life by Little League memories.

“The Sandlot” doesn’t offer such organization. In fact, for a movie about baseball, only one game is played. But much like a Little League no-hitter marred by five errors and a few beaned batters, the film transcends silly transgressions and manages multiple moments of pure, unadulterated magic.

Take a Fourth of July pick-up game, with neighborhood picnics almost like tailgaters outside a stadium surrounding the movie’s namesake. With fabulous fireworks exploding overhead, Benjamin Rodriguez (Mike Vitar) blasting a mammoth home run as his best friends watch with mouths agape captures the essence of an important memory.

These memories are Scotty Smalls’ (Tom Guiry) to mull over as he relives a summer of love not filled with sex and drugs, but baseball and friendship. Quaint, yes. But those initial scenes, where the awkward nerd pains to even throw a baseball, ring true for all the kids a tad on the uncoordinated side.

And like childhood memories can be, we see both the painfully immature and the classic hints of characters you’ll only know as kids. Smalls, with Rodriguez’s help, infiltrates the aura of the neighborhood’s baseball elite. Elite in the skills sense, that is. A glimpse at Hamilton “Ham” Porter (Patrick Renna) will tell you that he both swings a big stick and eats from big plates.

And in this introductory phase, we see the type of allusion that works both on its own and as a keen sense of history, much like baseball itself. With Smalls catching more flak than baseballs for his terrible game, Rodriguez takes the hopeless cause under his talented wing. He tells the lanky kid just to raise his glove high in the air, and he will do the rest.

The rest is the stuff of “only in the movies” moments, as Rodriguez spits on the baseball, takes a mighty swing and places the ball … right in the glove. It’s the visual accompaniment to Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Right Field,” a similar tale of outfield woes, without those pesky dandelions.

Both the song and “The Sandlot” equate youthful baseball with an age of innocence. Probably the best-remembered and most effective scene brings laughs just thinking about it: Michael “Squints” Palledorous (Chauncey Leopardi) taking the dive into the pool, driven to madness by Wendy Peffercorn and her … being. “This Magic Moment” by Jay and the Americans has never been put to greater use.

And just as Rodriguez realizes Peffercorn “knows exactly what she’s doing,” director/writer David Evans weaves in scenes that will appeal to younger kids with a story that still can capture an older audience. Unfortunately, we don’t get much of a glimpse into that process on the recently released DVD. A featurette is strictly by-the-numbers with the prerequisite number of cast quotes and enticing glimpses behind the scenes.

That’s about it for the extras. Surely, if “The Goonies” can garner a special edition, the contingent of “The Sandlot” fans deserve similar care. As it is, “The Sandlot” DVD “only” rekindles that need for baseball to start soon … and a desire to find that old glove, somewhere.