Baseball Inches Back, Casts Off This Terrible Winter
Snow, slush, odd moments where one wonders if the world is really ending: This winter has been getting a lot of people down. But here’s a reason to believe that there’s light at the end of the tunnel!
The first game of Spring Training is taking place right now in Port St. Lucie, Fla., where the spring squads of the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves are facing off. And the great thing about baseball is that in these early days, when the sun is just peeking out from behind the clouds and the promise of Florida’s weather is ever-closer, there’s a sense of hope for all fans — even those who, year in and year out, support the teams that were frequently tagged with the term “disappointing.” So even after last year’s awfulness surrounding the Mets (which, real talk, caused me to check out somewhere around mid-July), I am ready for baseball to begin again. I eagerly await many months of balls, strikes, Twitter-borne frustration, Keith Hernandez’s ratings of major cities’ steak-dinner offerings, and depressing Caesars Palace ads about viewers’ pathetic lives! (And I’m not alone in my anticipation — the game started four minutes early!)
Of course, for the Mets, March 2010 looks a little bit like August 2009; Nelson Figueroa is on the mound, and tons of regulars are on the bench. But the lineup is, thankfully, not the result of injuries or even a flu outbreak — instead, the threat of rain in Port St. Lucie is making the higher-ups cautious. (Even though the sky has a nice Mets’-hat-blue tinge to it right now!) “The key words in the camp this season are ‘prevention’ and ‘recovery,’ and they’ve already got prevention down,” Mets announcer Gary Cohen noted. (Twice.) Plus the optimistic types out there can take the fact that that Jose Reyes definitely won’t injure himself because of some errant mud today as some sort of sign.
No Mets fan is completely without pessimism, however, and so I have spent about 10 minutes hoping that the team’s trainers are doing something about pink eye prevention as well! Because really, being befallen by a conjunctivitis outbreak before the season begins would almost be as embarrassing as some of the games that I attended last season.
[Pic via]