"It's baseball, Ray. It's bigger than all of us."

There was video of pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training in Arizona and central/south Florida.

There were "baseball briefs" from said major league camps in my sports page this morning.

There were photos and articles about the hometown Rangers.

"There is also a civic interest by having the population at large leavened by millions of fans. They are spectators of a game that rewards, and thus elicits, a remarkable level of intelligence from those who compete. To be an intelligent fan is to participate in something. It is an activity, a form of appreciating that is good for the individual's soul, and hence for society...

...Being a serious baseball fan, meaning an informed and attentive and observant fan, is more like carving than whittling. It is doing something that makes demands on the mind of the doer. Is there any other sport in which the fans say they 'take in' a game? As in, 'Let's take in a game tomorrow night.' I think not. That is a baseball locution because there is a lot to ingest and there is time--although by no means too much time--to take it in.

Of all the silly and sentimental things said about baseball, none is sillier than the description of the game as 'unhurried' or 'leisurely.' Or that baseball has the 'pace of America's pastoral past.' This is nonsense on stilts. Any late twentieth-century academic who thinks that a nineteenth-century farmer's day was a leisurely, unhurried stroll from sunup to sundown needs a reality transplant. And the reality of baseball is that the action involves blazing speeds and fractions of seconds. Furthermore, baseball is as much a mental contest as a physical one. The pace of the action is relentless: There is barely enough time between pitches for all the thinking that is required, and that the best players do, in processing the changing information about the crucial variables...

...by witnessing the physical grace, the soul comes to understand love and beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions."--George Will, in "Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball"

The pitchers and catchers are there.
The position players follow shortly.
Professional baseball is upon us.
If you listen closely, you can hear the ball smacking the leather gloves.
All is right with the cosmos.