There Is Something Like Baseball On

You shouldn't really watch spring training baseball. Look at it from time to time, sure; let a game lay down a baseline level of low-intensity audio noise in the background by all means. It takes time to remember this, or just the length of one regulation winter to forget it. But as the days got longer and crueler and worse and the start of the baseball season began to feel less abstract despite being only slightly less distant, I tried to remind myself of this. There was going to be something that looked and sounded acceptably like baseball, and soon, and it was worth looking forward to that. But once it actually got here, I would need to remember not to overindulge. Let it back in, please and thank you, but do it like an IV drip—a little bit at a time, invisibly, to put some color in your cheeks.

Spring training is longer than it needs to be. It takes time for ballplayers to get back into playing shape, but nothing like the sort of time it took back when ballplayers spent their winters working second jobs or eating big greasy joints of mutton every night. Players do not arrive at spring training quite so wheezing and gouty anymore, or at least the percentage that arrive slicked in mutton sweat is lower than it was. MLB players stay in shape, they improve over the winter by refining their craft near the homes they own in states that don't have income taxes, or by throwing in front of high-speed cameras and coaches in converted warehouse spaces. But if it does not take a month and a half for contemporary ballplayers to look like contemporary ballplayers, it does take a while for the ballgames to look or feel like ballgames.