Drops of Jupiter
A whole lot of content for not a lot of actual news. Gotta love spring training!
Red shirts. White pants. Sunny skies. Palm trees. While some places might still be dealing with winter (though not so much around here, since it looks like it’ll be 70 on Monday) spring has definitely arrived in Florida with a whole flock of Cardinals descending on it.
On Meet Me at Musial tonight, my guest host is Alex Crisafulli, who has been vocal in the past about not really caring about spring training. While I look forward to seeing what he thinks now that this is the first real normal spring in three years, I can understand his philosophy a bit. Pitchers and catchers reporting, followed soon after (technically—most of them are there at the same time) by position players is a great milestone, an encouraging sign, but there’s not a lot of meaning there.
And that’s the best you can say. If you are getting significant news out of the first two weeks of spring camp, it’s probably not a good thing. We all remember Adam Wainwright going down immediately in 2011 and the number of times other pitchers, such as Alex Reyes, didn’t get far into the spring before being shut down. The good news about the Cardinals is that there is no news, really.
There’s a little bit of “Best Shape of His Life” reporting, of course. There’s strong comments about Nolan Gorman’s approach, there’s Willson Contreras continuing to endear himself to Cardinal fans by trolling Cub fans, there’s Jordan Hicks throwing hard. All sorts of things that ring the Pavlovian bell for Cardinal fans at this time of year.
Baseball is back in our atmosphere and I don’t think there should be any doubt that is a good thing. Nobody’s really acting like it’s summer, but when you see bullpens being thrown and batting practice being taken, it’s easy to listen to the spring and talk like June. When the games start firing up, it’s going to be even easier to fall for a shooting star when someone like Jordan Walker (or even someone with a more established track record, like Tyler O’Neill) starts ripping through the Grapefruit League.
The old adage, which at least in my mind is attributed to Tony LaRussa, is to never fall in love too early or too late in spring. Baseball is littered with folks like Aaron Brooks or John Nogowski, folks that looked like world beaters in limited exposure, especially since at least some of that exposure was against players that weren’t currently ticketed for the big leagues.
Then again, sometimes you get an Albert Pujols 2001. Or, more prosaically, a guy like Andre Pallante last year, who parleyed a strong spring into an Opening Day slot and never relinquished it. Spring doesn’t matter, unless it does.
We’ll see how the next few weeks play out. With so many big names heading out soon for their World Baseball Classic camps, we’ll get a chance to fall in love with a lot of guys that we wouldn’t normally be seeing. Don’t let the wind of the strikeouts sweep you off your feet or long balls sailing across the sun get you locked in on the next big thing. Odds are what happens in the season is going to be a lot different than what happens under the palm trees.
Easier said than done, of course…..
Honestly, this isn’t anything that needed to be written, but I haven’t done a post since the end of last year and I needed a few reps as well. The motivation hasn’t been there, though perhaps with games starting up and storylines beginning to develop I’ll find my way back to the keyboard more often. Of course, if you really want my opinions (and I’m not sure why you would) you can always hear me on Meet Me at Musial and Gateway to Baseball Heaven will be firing back up this Sunday. David Jones will be filling in for Tara for a while, given the loss of her father recently. Both places will be full of all sorts of Cardinal content!
As for the blog, I’m still trying to determine what I do there. Maybe it’s because of some of the recent Twitter changes or maybe it’s just something with our add-in, but there’s no longer the option to automatically push out links to Twitter or Facebook, which is frustrating. I really like the setup over here on Substack, though there are some limitations there as well. Then again, if I’m not doing Hero and Goats this year, which seems likely, the limitations here are minimal. My guess would be more of my writing will be here with still some over at the home place. If nothing else, series like Playing Pepper (which is already in process for the 2023 season), Exit Interviews, and Top Cards on Twitter would seem to work better in that environment.
Substack’s also added a chat feature if you download the app. You should have gotten an email about it, but if you missed that the details are here:
While I’ve got a Discord set up for the various podcasts (and I encourage you to join up there if you are looking for conversation, especially if you don’t want things intermingling), I’m hoping we can use the chat for some quick talks, maybe some topics that come up in games, or if you’ve got questions you want me to address.
On the geeky side of things, saw Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania last night. I’m exactly the audience Marvel wants—I even pretty much liked Eternals, for crying out loud—so the fact that I enjoyed it probably isn’t necessarily going to help you out if you are on the fence. That said, I left the most recent Doctor Strange and Thor movies feeling that they were all right, but not overwhelming. This was very enjoyable all the way through. It wasn’t quite as humorous as past Ant-Man movies but it still had plenty of humor while dealing with some serious world-building and table-setting. I doubt I go see it again in theaters but I look forward to catching it when it comes to streaming.
Finally, Star Wars. Currently watching The Bad Batch and while it’s still a fun show, it’d be nice if it had a little more connection to the wider galaxy. It’s a balancing act battling against being overly fan-servicey and having small universe syndrome while also feeling like Star Wars and showing connections to events, people, and places that we know. The two-part episode last week, episodes 7 and 8 on the season, helped reorient things a bit and let us see the larger galaxy picture. I look forward to seeing what the rest of the season has in store.
Of course, the end of the season is going to be overshadowed by The Mandalorian Season 3, which will overlap the end of BB. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the Mandalorian plots get resolved and you have to wonder what they have kept under wraps for this season, given the surprises of the last two.