Lincicome: Enjoy the promise that spring training provides
The usually happy phrase "pitchers and catchers report" is meant to apply to the Cubs and White Sox only as a warning.
Nevertheless, they are back. Not back here, but out there where promise and cactus coexist, one as prickly as the other.
In other words, spring training returns, on time and in Arizona, and in Florida, too, out of habit more than necessity, all preview and possibility, as erasable as chalk. And yet ...
It has been suggested, admittedly by me, that Chicago sports has two seasons, spring training and next year. Any variation, such as winning, earns someone a seat on a soft sofa in a studio explaining why this team, Sox, Cubs, Bulls, Bears, whatever, are crummier than the one he played on or managed.
In rare cases, the more unfortunate may get a hard seat in the dugout, the place where blame lurks. One way to look at the Cubs' David Ross is as the dean of Chicago sports skippers; another way to look at Ross is as the last lawn chair in a yard sale.
As for the Sox, the anonymous replacement for a legend as manager - his name will come to me before the end of the column, the replacement not the legend - as well as the loss of Jose Abreu, the best Sox player - seems to indicate more than casual spackling is necessary.
This is not to mention the looming embarrassment of a new Sox pitcher accused of "violating major league baseball's domestic violence policy," the details having something to do with choking a mom and throwing tobacco at an infant. While his name does occur to me, I choose to ignore it until it actually appears in a White Sox box score.
So that's where we are, both the Sox and Cubs projected to be solidly mediocre, somewhere just below break even, 77 or 78 wins, in the middle of their divisions, but as with all other teams, now comfortably optimistic that the best is ahead.
That's what spring training is for, postponing pain for promise, where the Cubs' Seiya Suzuki is forgiven for being ordinary and the Sox's Yoan Moncada is a candidate for "bounceback player of the year," proof being that Moncada returned his manager's phone calls and texts.
Well, maybe returned phone calls and texts are a new baseball metric, (RPCAT?) or maybe their number and frequency make a sportsbook bet. You cannot be too sure, even in the leisurely pace of spring.
My advice is to enjoy this. In spring training it is forever dawn. It is the time when all the bananas are green, all the sheets are fresh, and the clock has no alarm.
Spring training is a long, slow kiss. It is a first date, new each season.
It is all about promises being made. The season is about promises kept or promises broken. The boys of spring are always better than the boys of summer.
A phrase of romance and aspiration, spring training is unique to baseball. Football, basketball, hockey all have calisthenics and dress rehearsals without stirring any emotion other than impatience.
Other seasons start when they start, and everything before is just so much sweat.
The whole preamble could be junked and no one would miss any of it.
Baseball's goofy, cynical carelessness with our affections can be maddening, like promising faster games and bigger bases, but that is for another time. It is not necessary to dwell on baseball's flaws at the beginning of a new spring. You do not soil a new rug with insensitive shoes.
Why spring training? There can be pain in August. Losses are indelible. Injuries are reserved. The tomorrows of the many have to suffer through celebrations of the few. Truth has no exit. Now truth has the open gates of Sloan Park and Camelback Ranch.
Could it be that spring training is not for the players, after all, but for us? Who does not love baseball more when snow is on the ground, when the possible is the doable, when Sox manager Pedro Grifol is an answer and not a question.
See, I told you I would remember.