Like any good fan, I was delighted by the return to my television of Something Like Baseball. The Floridian and Arizonan existence of warmth and sunshine augurs their return to my own northern clime, and the ambient noises of baseball are comfort sounds in their own right. But I have gradually realized that spring training is not actually a time of hope, as I have long believed, but rather a time of despair. A time of pain.
A time to learn that your team's hotshot young starting pitcher, looking to follow up a star-making rookie season, couldn't complete a throwing session because of some back tightness. All subsequent updates—PRP injections! Shut down from throwing for a couple months!—are only ever more ominous.*
*This and all other anecdotes in this piece are real things that have happened to my team this spring.
This is the true face of spring: Six or so unrelenting weeks of hearing about your players getting injured, one after the other. No news is good news from spring training.
I understand why spring training exists. Guys need to get back into game shape. Muscles that went unused over the winter are soft and creaky. Logically, I know that if there were no spring training, all these injuries would just happen early in the season anyway. But there is little room for logical reaction when you hear that your middle-of-the-order slugger has pain in both elbows, somehow, and is hoping desperately to avoid undergoing surgery on them, because that would be a season-ender. Who did this to your boy?!!? Spring training did this.
It is the necessary but frustrating reality of preseason that the results cannot matter but personnel issues will affect the games that do. "Good news" from spring training is, like, beating the Cardinals' B-squad 7-0, or a new arrival hitting .476.—these things do not matter in the least. But when the slate is wiped clean for opening day, the guys who are hurt will remain hurt. Reports from spring training are like dispatches from World War I—a few insignificant inches of land may have changed hands, but at the cost of a horrifying list of casualties.
I experience spring training in a perpetual terror, fingers metaphorically plugging my ears, shouting LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, because if I do not, if I engage, I will read about how my team's aging, expensive, oft-injured utility guy, who was expected to compete for a starting job, is injured again and being shut down from all baseball activities. It is news I was half-expecting. I still don't care to hear it. That's spring training: the time when your fears manifest.
We are about halfway through the spring, so it can only get worse before it gets better. More of your guys will go down. A mysterious soreness will turn out to be something requiring surgery. Someone will seek a second opinion on something, and it will be as calamitous as the first. One of your prospects might look pretty good in split-squad games. It is a poor consolation for the carnage.
The only truly "good" and lasting news to come out of spring training is when a player on a rival team is injured, and that makes me feel like a terrible person. Spring training is evil.
Now to check this morning's headlines. Ah, I see my team's No. 1 starter probably needs Tommy John surgery.
