In Which I Eye A Giant Book On Baseball, Warily

 One of my spring rituals involves reading.

OK, to be fair, most of my rituals involve reading. Most of my life involves reading, one way or another. When  foldedfish   crashed with me briefly in Boston back in the early 90s, the first thing I told him was "any flat surface you can find that isn't covered in books is yours." If memory serves, he didn't find too many.

But the springtime ritual involves reading Baseball Prospectus. I'm a stone baseball fan and I make no bones about it. When I discovered deeper, more analytical ways to look at the game, I was ecstatic, though by no means could I be called a "stathead". There's still too much residual love for the heady days of Larry Bowa at short for the Phillies in me for me ever to go to a strictly WARP3-based fandom, and the analyst who notoriously told Jayson Stark that Phillies fans cheering a no-hitter were cheering the wrong thing just made me sad. That's one of the glories of baseball to me - the fact that it supports so many ways of looking at it, most of which do nothing but add to your enjoyment of the game. The heady math of Joe Maddon's substitution patterns to ensure a platoon advantage in 63% of all Tampa at-bats last year? Great stuff. The swarming legions of the Rays' uber-utility man horde climbing the walls of Yankee Stadium to pillage the fattest of cats? Equally great. And as a fan, I feel lucky to be watching baseball at a time when all of these narratives are available to me, to read and enjoy.

Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons I always anxiously await the arrival of BP every year. Heady with stats, heavy on the snark, it's a buffet of all the different ways to enjoy the game (one of those good buffets, mind you, where there's a sneezeguard over the salad bar, and they're constantly changing stuff out to make sure it's fresh, and nobody swipes a fried cheese stick through the 'nanner pudding just to see how it would taste). And normally I read the massive thing cover to cover as soon as it arrives.

This year, not so much. Oh, I've poked at it, read chapters and chunks and enjoyed them. But the urge to devour's gone this year. Perhaps it's because, after 16 years of wandering in the wilderness, I finally won my second league championship in my long-time fantasy league. (To provide some perspective, the last time I won, it was because of a late-season pickup of guys like Steve Avery and Craig Biggio. The Expos were in first place, behind ace starter Ken Hill. And people knew who Steve Jeltz was.) Maybe it's just because I'm getting pulled in so many other directions this year - work and reviews to do and stories to write and all sorts of other time-consuming goodness that doesn't allow me to cocoon for a couple of days immersing myself in crafty left-handers who are going to get the living bejesus smacked out of them by AA hitters and the like.

Or maybe I'm just ready for the season to start - I picked the book up much later than usual this year, and after a false start where I accidentally ended up with a second copy of last year's book - and I'm ready for the real stories, the ones that unfold on the field.

Play ball.