It's Spring O'Clock Somewhere

We have all agreed on lies before, why not this one?

Clover Park started as a brain seed from a man who wanted Port St. Lucie, Florida to have some baseball. Then some ground was broken in front of some cameras. During some Mets broadcasts some announcers said look at some of the progress being made on the team’s shiny new spring training complex, and video complemented their words, and viewers said yes, the Mets are a groundbreaking organization, hooray. Then the stadium was new and then it was old and then it was old with some new stuff and then you heard all about the bar nearby, Duffy’s, and then people pointed out Duffy’s was pretty crappy but everyone knew about Duffy’s, and it’s still around, so Duffy’s will outlive us all, so maybe stop saying the things you are saying about Duffy’s, our lord and savior.

It snowed a lot yesterday in New York and it is snowing again today. Pitchers and catchers reported in sunny Florida. There are less pictures of the young men in the best shape of their lives and the one player every year who looks like he gained weight but it was truly a bad camera angle because of COVID-19. The media availability of the manager and one player is more distant than usual from New York for the same reason. The Mets make impossibly upbeat predictions and we roll our eyes and feel bad about rolling our eyes and then give ourselves a break because we are usually right to do so, but your eyes might stay that way if you keep doing that. It just isn’t the same when the Mets say those ridiculous things we want to be true through a blurry Zoom video. Natural sunlight ricocheting off their caps as they insist this is the year it all comes together underscores the optimism. When a player predicts a summer and October of domination, love, and understanding and it looks like he is being held hostage, there’s some mixed signals going on. It’s more disorienting than watching sweaty pitchers throw and looking out the window and seeing your car under a foot of snow. We are used to that one.

You want to believe the predictions, the lies the players and coaches and owners tell themselves and to us to make meeting other human beings during a pandemic worthwhile. It doesn’t help that slowly but surely every member of the 2018 Mets coaching staff are getting outed as fucking creeps. The trick is to be skeptical, not cynical, to suspend the skepticism everything will be alright and everyone will be on their best behavior from now on, to assume the tanned innocent are innocent until proven guilty, for the sake of holding onto February tradition and sanity, let the legerdemain of pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training do its magic and subsume our cold hearts and minds. But man oh man, it’s hard sometimes.