The
baseball season never ends. Not these days at least. Spring Training flows
smoothly into the Regular Season, which proceeds for six months with only one
three-day break; a break that is now required to be a classic, not a respite. The
regular season then transitions into the postseason, now a month-long classic
driven by viewership demands to last deep into October.
Then, the Hot Stove Season begins.
The Hot Stove Season comes into spontaneous existence the moment the last out
of the World Series is recorded, but in an absurd ritual, the various networks
and websites insist on spending a week fêting the newly crowned champions and
pretending that the fans of the other twenty-nine teams actually care how they
feel about finally winning it all. Then, once the midmarket team that everyone
with a monetary stake in the playoff television ratings now despises has been
suitably interrogated, dissected and dismissed, the real Hot Stove Season can
commence. Hours of speculation, top ten prospect lists and sightings of this
year’s disgraced former superstar/revealed steroid user cannot approach the
excitement of the Regular Season.
Thus, the first day of February is
met with a plethora of articles pining for those four inestimable words: “pitchers
and catchers report.” Spring Training has become such an institution for true
baseball fans and moneymaker for Arizonans and Floridians that it is difficult
at times to remember that what occurs on those sun-destroyed fields is neither
meaningful nor entertaining. Traditional baseball fans soak up the banter and
gossip about the battle for the Cub’s fifth outfield spot with all the
enthusiasm of a newly minted second lieutenant told that the artillery will
flatten the wire and his men should walk across No-Man’s Land. (There’s my
cynical military history education for you.)
The desolation of the Hot Stove
Season makes the incessant workouts and the split squad games seem fun,
meaningful. The pointless statistics produced during spring training games present
a tantalizing paradox for the sabermetrically inclined baseball fans. On one
hand, these sabermetricians are so starved of new inputs at this point in the
baseball cycle that they are desperate to embrace any numbers so long as they
are accompanied by an acronym or percentage sign. Yet their sabermetric souls,
their bastions of inner reason and objectivity cry out against such statistics.
“Park effects!” cries the bereaved Fangraphs
writer as the couple in the row behind him remarks about how many homeruns
Travis Ishikawa has compiled in the last two weeks.
“Inconsistent competition!” cries
the desperate Hardball Times writer as he attempts to convince the man beside
him in the Rangers hat that Nelson Cruz’s .500 batting average is not a sign that
he is “peaking after thirty.”
Back at the hotel, a young man who
comments incessantly on Hardballtalk whenever Ryan Howard’s RBI’s are mentioned
weeps the immortal refrain of the sabermetrician into his thin pillow: “small
sample size.”
Despite the pain and anguish that
the annual pilgrimage to Spring Training entails, these men and women put in
the effort every year because the month of March is actually the worst month of
the baseball year. It is not the dog days of winter that suck the soul out of a
baseball fan, it is the hollow statistics of Spring Training that can drive a
baseball fan, sabermetrically inclined or otherwise, to do something crazy like
predict a Pittsburgh World Series appearance.
The only difference is, the sabermetricians
are painfully aware of every moment of their month of torture, while the
traditional fans have evolved mentally to the point where watching Emmanuel
Burriss bat third for a team claiming to be the Giants seems like fun.
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