A Day Full of Meaning
The first day of baseball workouts coincides with a couple of holidays.
If you spent much time on the platform formally known (and still called in these parts) as Twitter yesterday, you know that baseball is returning. Pictures of players walking into camp (or leaving it) taken by writers and regional cable journalists. Videos of players playing catch with all the atmospheric conditions of Florida. Our first look at new Cardinals wearing the red (the actual jerseys, that’s another topic.) Yesterday was a big day.
Today is the first day of workouts for pitchers and catchers, kinda the first “real” day of the baseball season. It also coincides this year on the calendar with two holidays, one secular, one sacred.
Valentine’s Day has been called a made-up holiday pushed by florists and card manufacturers. Be that as it may, it’s also a day focused on love. Whether deep and abiding or frothy and frilly, love is a vital part of human existence.
The problem is, in the English language, love is one word that encompasses a whole lot of feeling. If you love your pizza like you love your mom, you need to see a therapist. There’s “I really like it” love, there’s “casual approval” love, and there’s “for better and for worse” love.
The Cardinals decided last season to test whether their fanbase was the middle or the latter. A good portion of fans, especially the online version, couldn’t remember a time when the Cards were truly bad. There could be an argument that they weren’t as bad as their record—our friend Dayn Perry has a great look at why there was some bad luck on the offensive side of things—but 71 wins is 71 wins. It was pretty miserable all the way through.
Most of the fans, though, stuck through the thin results. They didn’t do it without complaining or a lot of grumbling, but that was in part because they cared so much. I am sure some people walked away from the team but it seems unlikely their roots were very deep. From my experience, basically everyone is back for another round this year with the expectation that it will be a much better season than last.
A fan’s love for their team is hard to really label. The fan dedicates money, time, and passion to a collection of players that, while wanting to play well for the larger “fans”, doesn’t have any real connection with a specific “fan”. In many regards, the relationship is one-sided. Yet as fans we sign up for this anyway, with the enjoyment of the game (hopefully with a large bit of success) worth it from our point of view.
Before we leave this section, let me stick with my reputation and offer you some Valentine’s Day thoughts:
Girl, with you every day is Sonny.
I’m so Lynn love with you.
Our Rom-ance is just how I Drew it up.
Our love story covers so many Pages.
You are worth more than Goldschmidt to me, Valentine.
I want to be more than your Buddy.
Every day with you is a Winn-er.
I would Walker 500 miles for you, Sweetheart!
Valentine’s Day tends to be fun and bubbly. Ash Wednesday most assuredly is not.
For those of you not of the Christian tradition (or are from a denomination that may not observe the season), Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent is the 40 days (not counting Sundays) before Easter that are set aside for spiritual discipline, often marked by giving up something during the period.
While my Christian analogies tend to run toward a galaxy far, far away (and one of my Lenten traditions is to write new ones for the site), I have often made the comparison between the season of Lent and spring training. Both run in the early spring, almost completely overlapping each other. (This year Easter will see the Cards wrapping up their first series in Los Angeles.) They are times for getting into shape, ramping up for a big day but the training carries beyond the celebration into the day-to-day. They are times of focus, of preparation, of diligence.
That doesn’t mean that spring training or Lent needs to be a dour and depressing time, though sometimes spring training can be that way when injuries pop up (Adam Wainwright in 2011, Alex Reyes in 2017 for instance). In fact, we are told not to make our fasting to be a notable deal. There is significant joy in both of these seasons and joy needs to be expressed outwardly.
For those that celebrate, may your Lent be meaningful. For those that don’t, I’ll move on.
There were two notable things that came out of spring training yesterday, though the more frivolous we didn’t a picture of until today.
That’s a man that really enjoyed Barbie. Probably a good thing he didn’t feel the same way about Oppenheimer.
The other story was a little bit more weighty, though ironically part of the issue was they were lighter. Fanatics has taken over making the jerseys for all the MLB teams and shall we say that first reactions weren’t mixed because there was nobody not under Nike contract that was saying good things about them.
Look, nobody likes Fanatics. There are horror story after horror story about their quality, their customer service, their return policies. My only real interaction was when I bought an Arenado shirsey through them soon after the trade. I specified a 2X because your boy takes up room. What I got was 1) significantly smaller and 2) a woman’s cut. Because I couldn’t get refunded my initial shipping and I would have had to pay shipping back, I would up giving it to my pastor’s daughter, who was significantly smaller than I was in all aspects. Fit her quite well.
I continue to be astounded that Fanatics not only isn’t out of business but has done well enough for itself to start partnering with all the major sports. They took over baseball cards. You can’t go to a team site, pro or college, without having to go through them. It’s a testament to how much the owners and leagues want to save money. No one with an eye to quality would have ever gotten into a business relationship with this group.
It’s also notable that this new process from Nike hasn’t done anything to bring down the prices of shirts and jerseys. Costs have gone up, quality has gone down, and that’s why the only current player shirt I have is an Arenado I bought at the team store in 2022. I wanted to buy a couple of players but seeing $50 for a T-shirt disabused me of that idea quickly.
It’s possible that we’ll just get used to it and it won’t be as bad as we think. If the players truly don’t like playing in them, they do have a lot of leverage to get better quality, at least. The visual part we may just have to stomach. Doesn’t make you excited about the City Connect jerseys, does it?
The run of great guests on Meet Me at Musial continues. The aforementioned Mr. Perry was on last week and Jason Hill from Viva El Birdos joins me on Friday night. In the next few weeks I’ll have Kyle Reis and Will Leitch on, but not at the same time.
The Bad Batch starts up a week from today. Early reviews make it out to be a really intriguing season. I believe I heard something about it connecting up everything—the prequels, the originals, the sequels—and with the cloning subplot you can see how that could happen. Three episodes drop next Wednesday and I can’t wait to see them.
I’m also quite excited that The Phantom Menace will return to theaters at the beginning of May. I watched it a few times on the big screen when it came out (and once when it was re-released in 3D) and I look forward to going with my son, who wasn’t even thought of 25 years ago. There’s something fun about watching these movies, movies that you have almost memorized, back in a theater after decades of just seeing it on TV. The prequels have seen some rehabilitation—The Clone Wars adding context had a large hand in that, along with just time and a new generation—and I’m interested to see if the sequels will as well over the next two decades.
If you are a player in the Twitter game #bombsaway we’ve got an announcement for you coming this afternoon.
I do like the analogy.