PITCHERS AND CATCHERS REPORT TODAY!!!!!!!! YES, GET PSYCHED OUT OF YOUR SKULLS!!!!!
I’m sorry friends, but I just can’t. I realize this is the symbolic “starting of baseball” and all that crap, but c’mon, you’re going to get psyched today, and then until spring training games start in another 10-14 days, literally nothing is going to happen.
Do you all realize you are celebrating over 100 guys, 90% of whom one, you and I have absolutely no idea who they are, and two, have no real shot at making the big league roster, going through drills pretending to throw a baseball off the mound, pretending to field said imaginary baseball, and then more pretend throwing it to first base?
Now, by Sunday, they might actually incorporate a baseball into these drills. Then by mid-week next week, they might actually see live hitters in the batters box, but those live hitters are just there to be stationary and serve no purpose other than to be the presence of a “live hitter”.
Excuse me if I don’t get jacked up over that ridiculous nonsense.
For me, baseball started at the Winter Meetings. Oh yes, you remember, the most eventful days in January we may have ever seen? Names like Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, and Wil Myers all were moved (ironically to the same place).
When teams start improving their rosters and free agents start putting on new uniforms and prospects make the 40 man roster, those are the days that to me, signify the start of the baseball season.
That is when hope for a new beginning, improvements on great seasons and watching rebuilds begin are my start of the baseball season.
I realize nothing beats seeing guys with cleats on, digging into the dirt on the pitchers mounds and all that, believe me, I love seeing Matt Harvey on the hill for the first time since the day it was announced he needed Tommy John Surgery.
But I just feel like the “devoted” baseball fan has completely forgotten one of the most eventful winters we’ve had in recent memory.
Why does baseball have to have “an official start date”? That’s just an asinine concept to me.
Within weeks of crowning a World Champion, the offseason starts. In no other sport is that the case. The Patriots have been champions for almost three weeks and the NFL combine is just now underway but the draft isn’t until May or something ridiculous. The NFL makes you wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and just when you think you’ve waited long enough, you wait some more, and then all of a sudden it goes banana sandwich crazy with stuff.
The NBA crowns their champion then almost a month and a half later you have the NBA draft, then free agents can sign, then weeks later training camps open up. Then you wait almost two months through ridiculous exhibitions and preseason games and then the season starts with no pomp or circumstance. It just starts.
Folks, we have the most active sport. While the NFL is the most popular sport in America, true baseball fans know, this game never stops.
I love what the MLB Network is doing with their coverage of the Arizona Fall League in November then the Caribbean Series finals in January and February.
In December, free agents really start to fall into place. You start wanting your team to talk to that big name and anti up and give him the money you know will get to get your team to the next level.
You have a surplus of prospects and no places for them, so you want your GM to move those guys for impact arms or impact bats. That’s December folks.
Then it really picks up in January. Of any offseason event other than the NFL, I have to say the baseball winter meetings have been as good as any.
Then of course we get the “start of baseball” in February, and the over-analyzed and talked about until you're blue in the face, most irrelevant news.
Folks, the baseball season never sleeps. I work in news. When I collect sports on about quarter til six every morning and I do search of ”MLB”, there is rarely a day where the message “No News To Report” pops up. Rarely.
While I love college basketball and college football and the NFL, there is no other sport I can honestly say that about.
There is always something going on in the world of baseball, and if you feel like a day where guys go through the motions at a place 80% of them have been for the better part of two weeks, if not longer, already training, knock yourselves getting stoked over it.
Myself, I prefer to realize it’s just the next dot in the continuous cycle of what it means to be a baseball fan.
I choose realize it’s no more meaningful than the last pitch of the World Series, the first pitch of Opening Day, the first free agent to sign or the first big move of the offseason to be made.
It’s not “the start of baseball”. It’s: baseball.
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