Valentine's Day is for baseball lovers, too

Just as Wednesday’s sunny skies and balmy temperatures held the promise of spring ascendant, this Saturday will provide baseball fans with the promise of a new season. Feb. 14 marks the beginning of the eight-and-a-half-month marathon that will be the 2009 baseball season.

It’s easy for us to take that day as the starting gun for this season’s pennant race, as the day when it becomes OK to start e-mailing trade proposals to our fantasy-league opponents and to figure out who exactly will be filling out the laundry we root for.

Baseball, though, is not a sport of moments. It’s the tortoise of the sports world, a long trek understandable only in the aggregate. Even those moments that we do remember — Curt Schilling’s bloody sock, Bill Buckner’s error — are rarely the defining examples we hold them out to be. Each of those examples, for instance, would not have been anything more than a historical oddity without the Game 7 that followed.

Our culture obsesses over moments. We like to pick apart every play and treat each game as if it has some enormous, outsized meaning. Football is the perfect sport for that mindset, the ultimate in now-ness. We can look back at a game and identify its turning points with relative ease. And with only 16 games in an NFL season, it’s easy to predict which ones will be important before the season begins and to figure out which ones actually were important after the season ends

Baseball just doesn’t work that way. A major-league team plays a game pretty much every day from April to October. If your team misses the playoffs by one game, as the Mets have the past two seasons, you’ll agonize over a dozen close losses or blown leads that could have, should have, gone your way.

Only the bigger picture is important: it’s why season and career records are so much more important to a baseball fan than single-game achievements. Each loss lacks meaning because it can be so easily undone by wins the next two days, and each win lacks meaning for the same reason. Because of that strange dynamic, playing and watching baseball are of secondary importance to the analysis and debate over what has or what will happen.

That’s why the promise means so much. When we hear about “pitchers and catchers” in February, it means something because it will eventually mean something, because nothing real will actually change tomorrow. We speak of spring training and the off-season as two distinct parts of a year in baseball. But that’s just not true: In a lot of cases, pitchers and catchers, not to mention rookies, have already reported, and others won’t report for another week. There isn’t a bright line between the off-season and the preseason.

What’s more, because baseball is the sport in which roster changes both before and during the season are most prominent and widespread, the line between the general managers’ territory and the realm of play is blurry to nonexistent.

Try to think of the last time there was a truly earth-shattering trade right before the NFL’s trading deadline or the last time an All-Pro wide receiver was still an unrestricted free agent the day before training camp began. Situations like these are par for the course in baseball.

So tomorrow there won’t be any midnight-madness practices or huge, dramatic moments to rivet us. Still, I look forward to it as the symbol of a new beginning.

I’ll take baseball up on its promise of rebirth and renewal, and I’ll focus on the future because looking at that future and debating the possibilities of what might come are more interesting and, in a week in which the past once again gave the sport a black eye, more enjoyable for fans.

It’s time to start playing ball again. I hope there won’t be a September collapse for the Mets this year.