I have a confession to make: I don't give a rat's ass about Spring Training games. I never have and I probably never will. I love seeing new players in new uniforms, talking about the positional battles, seeing which rookies will make an impression and stick with the big league club--but the games are meaningless to me. I don't watch, I don't listen, and I don't check to see if the Yankees won or if so-and-so did well. There are quite a few reasons for that, but the reality is that the Spring Training standings don't predict regular season results (
ESPN went over this a few years back) and--as
Crashburn Alley wrote a month ago--players Spring Training statistics aren't indicative of their regular season performance either.
"But wait, Andrew," says the contrarian. "The Yankees ended up with the best record in Florida and the Angels dominated Arizona and they met in the ALCS." True...very true. But the Yankees underperformed their Spring Training winning percentage by over 7% and the Angels by over 16.5%. The only team to make the playoffs in the National League with a winning Spring was the Cardinals. The Phillies were 13-19 and the Dodgers were 15-22. The Brewers dropped almost 20% and the Marlins improved 15%. The only teams that came close to their regular season winning percentage (within 3%) in the Spring were the A's (-2.28), Red Sox (-0.18), the Orioles (1.27), the Cubs (1.55), the Giants (1.82) and the Indians (2.62). And I think those are more coincidence than anything else (though the Red Sox did come awfully close).
I'm all for watching as much baseball as possible, but when people are experimenting with new pitches and teams make switches as often as they do in the Spring, it doesn't carry any meaning for me. It's cool to see Curtis Granderson and Johnny Damon play their old club, but I'll save my energy and time for when it really counts (and they will play their old clubs yet again) and leave
the newspapers to worry about the rest. And pray that no one gets injured.
On a totally different note, I realized that if teams really want to improve their lot in baseball, they may just want to switch from the Cactus League to the Grapefruit League. Check out the dismal lot of the Grapefruit League teams:
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