I got to thinking this morning about how many newspapers and Internet venues and blogs would be written trumpeting the dawning of a new spring because pitchers and catchers reported to camps in Florida and Arizona yesterday. I wondered how many people would Write about the smell of pine tar or softened leather, the reemergence of hope, the peace of melting snow, or high and spectacular blue skies. There was a day as recent as last year at this time when a blog like that would have been a given from me, and the words would have poured out of me with vehemence, and it would have been sappy, and it would have been rich with sentiment, but even all my friends, whose chief activity in life is belittling each other, would have agreed with it because we are baseball junkies.

I flipped around the Net this morning. There they were. Phrases like, "there was the sweet sound of leather meeting leather," riddled the pages. They've been written so many times before by writers far superior than the paltry $40,000/year columnists who petter to the masses to try and get readers. They were written first by writers who found the words out of love not obligation -- by Lardner, by Giamatti, by Harris, by Malamud, by Thayer, by Mencken, by Pierce, by Hemingway. But I'm not going to write that blog this year. I'm not going to conform to the mainstream. I'm not going to talk about how yesterday in Philly, just a mere 5 days after more than a foot of snow fell to the ground, it was 56 degrees in the middle of February, and the remaining snow was wet enough to make perfect snowballs, and the ground looked as though it had seen enough, and it was ready for the new life that would spring from it.

Spring.

Everything about that word begets "inception," "beginning," "start," "birth." Does it get old year after year? I don't know the answer to that, but I know I won't be writing about how at 31, I find the time to oil up my own glove around this time of year. I find myself grabbing one of the bats that sit in the corner of the house all winter, unfettered, and find myself taking cuts in the living room. I won't tell you about how after watching the chess board of the Hot Stove off-season, I get thrilled to begin my own chess game, hunting furiously for the possibility that comes fresh with every new season. I won't write that.

I won't write about how each year, when you're a Phillies fan, you're left holding the bag, but each year, like clockwork, because baseball marks time more than any of our seasons, die hards re-ante.

I won't write about how I can't wait to watch the first World Baseball Classic, where you just have a feeling that the commitment of foreign nations to win the prize of this "American" sport is deep, and how somewhere you'll see the Americans catching on and realizing what it is about, and the intensity levels rising through summer and right to October in the middle of March.

I won't write about how intriguing it is that a young stud prospect like the Phillies Gavin Floyd, who worked with Johnny Podres in Puerto Rico all this off-season, has another chance to start the lawnmower -- maybe his last chance. I won't write about how the thought of the potential of Cole Hamels, Gio Gonzalez and Scott Mathieson in the starting rotation at AA Reading of the Eastern League doesn't get me a little bit pumped for the future at Citizens Bank Park.

I certainly won't write about baseball marking the end of winter. Our winter was a lamb and there might still be a lion out there. I won't write about a longing for the first weekday night game at the ballyard with a light sweater and 3 dogs and 6 Miller Lites and a few strategically placed comments to the opposition about how their last name is a pun for something that is funny, or how they hit .212 with runners in scoring position last year. I won't write about how I miss calling "Chipper" Jones "Larry" in the same intonation that college basketball crowds yell "asssss-holllllle" to the refs.

No matter what, it's most important that I don't write about how in the deep, recessed, utterly obsessive, completely deranged inner sanctum of my mind, I believe my team can win this year. I believe they can play in October. I believe they can challenge for a ring.

Or do I believe? Do we just believe self-consciously? Do we just believe because all our lives it's what we are conditioned to do this time of year? Is it Pavlovian? I'm not smart enough to know that, but I know those first few weeks will be glorious, heartbreaking, or frustrating. Glorious if the subconscious beliefs are fulfilled by a rapid start. Heartbreaking if the track record of proving my subconscious wrong continues. Frustrating if it's in between, if I see signs that it could go either way, and I'm left to ride that ebb and flow that is a baseball season. There's nothing to do but muddle through spring training though, wait for the grass to turn green again, wait for that first official starting lineup, that first official national anthem, that first official hallowed call by the masked man behind the plate to "play ball." But all of life is waiting, and yesterday was only pitchers and catchers.

And I won't write about that.