Today is a day for baseball.
All that we know about our team is all that we saw through the murky lens of Spring Training. Some players are known for getting off to poor starts. Pitchers are experimenting with different pitches to perfect them. They aren’t as judicious with their selection.
The experiments of March will cause some fans to completely discount all of the bad they saw throughout Spring Training. The optimist will say, “He was working on his breaking ball,” or “he always gets off to a poor start in the Spring.”
Others will have plenty of concerns. The skeptic will say, “Neither Gallardo, Jimenez, nor Tillman could even manage an ERA under 5.” They’ll have concerns that our starting pitching won’t be able to keep the score low enough for this stacked lineup.
The optimist and the skeptic will see the positives of Spring differently, too.
The optimist will use the experimental nature of Spring as an argument that the team has even more room for improvement. They’ll say, “If they can get it going so early when they’re not trotting out their best lineup and pitchers every day, what’s to stop them from continuing that momentum through the regular season?”
The skeptic will say, “Yeah, but opposing pitchers are experimenting with different types of pitches.” He will be the ones to explain regression when your friends when your friends talk about the ridiculous ending Chris Davis had to last season. He’ll be the one with concern about the giant commitment the Orioles made to a power hitter who has already reached the age of 30.
Today is a day of hope for both of them. The optimist is hopeful that he is proven right.
The skeptic, conversely, hopes to be proven wrong.
A new year of baseball is exciting because we don’t know anything. Different perspectives and attitudes will create varying degrees of optimism.
Whether you fall into one of these two categories or somewhere in between, we can all agree on one thing.
Today is a day for baseball.
And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.
