Do Your Worst, Old Man

Thanks for the silver lining, pal — it so happens I was already feeling sunny. There are Eddie Gaedel-sized drifts of snow in my backyard. Big whoop. Do your worst, Old Man Winter. Because you're going down.

Warm winter or no, this is the kind of storm that, had it arrived in early to mid-January, might have sent my usual mild case of seasonal-affective-disorder-induced grouchiness spiraling into something deeper and darker. But today? Ha. Pitchers and catchers report on Wednesday Thursday, and once that happens, any statistics winter should accumulate will go into the books with an asterisk.

Sure, there'll be another big storm in March — there always is. So what. A month from now, we'll be solidly into spring training and whatever additional delights/worries/novelties the WBC brings us. Mike Pelfrey will be looking good, Bret Boone will be in the best shape of his life, Kaz Matsui will have a new attitude, Billy Wagner will have found acceptance in a new clubhouse. Or maybe you'll see different names paired with those phrases, but we'll be repeating them nonetheless, seeking to wring whatever meaning we can out of them. (My Blog Brother, on the other hand, may be camped out in Eliot Spitzer's lobby by then, since this year, alas, looks like it'll be his turn to suffer the wickedness of the Dolans and Cablevision's flying monkeys.)

And two months from now? We'll have ridden spring training straight into the '06 schedule, eight games deep — deep enough to no longer quite be able to rattle off the outcome of every contest. The full roster will have taken the field, with the possible exceptions of a fifth starter, bullpen specialist or someone they can't decide to DL or not. Someone will look great, filling us with overconfidence. Someone will look decidedly less than great, filling us with agita. It'll be here before we know it.

Such predictions hardly make me Nostradamus (or his infinitely more entertaining descendent Metstradamus). These things happen every year, regular as clockwork, predictable as morning following night, which is simultaneously the delight of baseball for those who hear its call and the barrier to entry for those unfortunates who do not. It's just a roundabout way of saying winter is on the ropes, whatever tricks it's got left to throw at us. 26.9 inches in Central Park? Whatever — gimme 269 inches of slush and mess if you want, oh vilest and most useless of seasons. Because come the day after the day after tomorrow, we'll have won through your kingdom once more, to the place where real life begins again.