Matt McLain (SI.com)
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Baseball’s best time of year is right now. I will entertain no debate on this. Youse can gum-flap all day about meaningless games and the endless conga-line of best-shape-o’-my-life stories. You’re right. I’m right-er.
A few reasons:
Baseball works best as a concept. Always has. The idea of going to a game is often better than actually following through, and I say that as someone whose affection for the game grows every spring.
The pastoral blessing of sun, sky, grass and living geometry owes more to the work of poets and novelists and sports scribes who think they’re poets and novelists than to actual experiences. Fathers Playing Catch With Sons Syndrome.
No time of year more fully captures the bliss of baseball than this time, right now. If you’ve been to spring training, in either Florida or AZ, you will agree.
Nobody’s angry today. Players might be concerned with lingering aches or their roster spots, but they haven’t struck out or lost a game that mattered.
If you’re a media heathen, players actually don’t mind speaking to you.
And the predictions. The suggestions of hope and despair. The debates that further the interest. Who’s good, who’s overrated, who will Break Out? The craic is especially good in the ‘Nati now, because these Reds are nothing if not mysterious. They’re capable of warming your heart or breaking it, in the same game.
What fun.
CBS Sports offered a prediction today: Who’s the best player on each MLB team?
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