Daily Jolt: Pitchers and Catchers? More Like Perfect Timing

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.

Even for baseball, where winter can seem as endless as a trek through the desert with Lawrence of Arabia, this has been a long and cold one. Long before the Alex Rodriguez revelations, the free-agent market slowed to a crawl, bogged down by the economic downturn. Rather than getting treated to the usual flurry of Hot Stove transactions, we got a series of big-money Yankee signings and an endless stream of updates on the on-again, off-again, still-unresolved Manny Ramirez negotiations.

Then along came Rodriguez, the latest great to have his legacy tinged by performance-enhancing drugs. Whether you are deeply upset by his admitted steroid use, tired of hearing righteous pundits cast indignant stones at baseball while ignoring the drug problems in other sports or both, you've probably already grown tired of the story.

That was followed Wednesday by Miguel Tejada's guilty plea to lying about his knowledge of steroid use and the shocking allegations against former All-Star Roberto Alomar, which, by the way, if they are true certainly put A-Rod's confession and Tejada's plea in perspective. The mere idea that someone would knowingly expose a partner to the HIV virus is disturbing, and make no mistake, it is a baseball story. Alomar is notable only because of what he did in the major leagues and he will be on the Hall of Fame ballot next year.

The hits have come hard and fast, especially lately. It just hasn't been very much fun to be a fan the last few months.

Baseball is our national pastime for many reasons. It is pastoral and traditional and democratic. It is brutally unfair, complex, intellectual, multi-layered and yet simple at the same time. "You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains," to quote the movie Bull Durham.

Its greatest quality of all might be redemption. There's always the next pitch, next at-bat, next game, next year. The season begins in spring as the Earth thaws and ends in fall as it begins to go into hibernation.

All on its own, the game has healing qualities. Babe Ruth's home runs helped the sport recover from the Black Sox Scandal. Steroid-fueled or not, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought many fans back to the game after the 1994 strike. And the heroics of Tino Martinez, Scott Brosius and Derek Jeter played a small part in giving New York its swagger back after 9/11.

This has hardly been baseball's worst offseason, but it has been memorable almost solely for its ugliness, for its probing of the seedy underbelly of the sport.

And that's where the game -- the one played in between the lines, not in Congress or on the back pages of a New York tabloid or in an awkard interview on SportsCenter -- comes in. When Tim Lincecum throws his first bullpen and Evan Longoria steps in for his first batting practice session, everything else will begin to wash away or at least fade to the background.

The Red Sox officially open camp Thursday in Fort Myers, Fla. The remaining 29 teams will follow suit on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Not a moment too soon.