Well, baseball fans, another exciting spring training season is coming to an end. For the Yankees, it was filled with heartbreak, as they failed to defend their 2009 Grapefruit League championship. With a 13-15 record headed into the last game of the season, the Bombers are a distant 11th place, 6.5 games behind the new champion Tampa Bay Rays.
Of course, even if you're a die-hard Yankees fan, you probably didn't know their record this Spring, or that they won anything last March. As we all know, if Derek Jeter gets three hits in a Grapefruit League contest, it doesn't get him any closer to 3,000 in the record books. If C.C. Sabathia gets shelled on March 15, his ERA is still 0.00 come Opening Day. And, much to my chagrin, the winner of the Grapefruit League doesn't meet the winner of the Cactus League in some sort of practice World Series. None of it really matters.
And maybe that's why I enjoy the exhibition season so much. Those first couple of weeks, after a long, baseball-free Winter, are for baseball purists, for whom just seeing the green grass of the field and hearing the thwack of ball against bat is enough. So what if some guy I've never heard of who's wearing number 98 is doing the thwacking?
After years of watching the Spring training action on TV, I finally made it down to Florida with my fellow baseball-obsessive D-Train for a long weekend of Grapefruit League games. D-Train was determined to keep score for all four games we attended -- an arduous task during the regular season, but particularly masochistic during the first week of spring training, when teams generally put about 20 players apiece on the field during the course of a game. PA announcers don't always bother to announce who's replacing whom, if they even know, and official scorers, if there are any, don't always bother to determine hits and errors. Somehow, though, he managed to record every scrub's appearance in every game -- my personal favorite was at the Tigers-Astros game, when Deik Scram followed Eric Roof in the batting order. (Our "the Roof is on fire" and "go on, scram" chants were big hits at Joker Marchant Stadium, I gotta tell you.)
D-Train was about the only one, it seemed, who was paying attention. Going to a Spring training game, you get a completely different vibe than during the regular season. The parks are much smaller for a start -- 10,000 capacity or less is the norm. There's very little in the way of music or other annoying sound effects coming from the PA system, so a March game is a much quieter, more contemplative experience than one between April and October. And the crowds are much more subdued. They seem to be enjoying the mere act of attending a baseball game, rather than giving much thought to what's happening on the field.
My favorite part of Spring training games are the last couple of innings, when they're exclusively populated with assorted hot young prospects and no-names up from the minors for a quick look-see by the parent club. For some of them, it's as close as they'll ever come to being in the majors. For others, it's a first taste of what will be a long and successful big-league career. Either way, being on that field is likely a highlight of their lives to date, and I try to drink in the moment with them and appreciate it in the same way they do.
Until my mind wanders and I start to think, is the beer vendor at the Phillies game in Clearwater the same guy I saw at the Yankees game in Tampa yesterday? (Actually, it was. They work whichever game is in the area that day.) Or I check my email on my iPhone. Or I decide I need some more sunscreen. It's a Spring training game, after all. It's meaningless. I don't know who these players are, and try though I might, I can't bring myself to care that much.
And by the end of March, even I, an exhibition aficionado, am getting a little antsy for the regular season to start. The scrubs are mostly gone, the novelty has worn off, and what we wind up seeing is a bunch of bored regulars playing in contests that look like regular season games, only with less drama and excitement. For me, the real Spring training season ended when the last million-to-one shot with a jersey number in the 90s got sent back down to the minors.
So congratulations to the Grapefruit League champion Rays and the Cactus League pennant winners, the San Francisco Giants. Thank you for all the thrills, Andrew Brackman and Colin Curtis and Kevin Russo and Jon Weber and, um, you, number 91, whose name I forget. And to echo the old refrain of the fans whose dreams of a Spring training championship have been dashed, "Wait 'til next March!"