Look! It’s so sunny, and palm-y and Brancusi-y. (Photo by Michael J. Mandeville, Flickr)

Even though a blizzard is just about to blow through the north-east, it’s really almost time for there to be pre-pre-baseball! Yup, it’s that’s time of year. A time of renewal, a time of “best-shape-of-your-life”, a time of grapefruits and cactuses, a time of …spring training statistics.

Look, I know you know spring training statistics are dumb and meaningless, but sometimes in the spring it’s easy to get caught up. I mean,  here we are, looking at news about Mike Leake avoiding arbitration, and stressing out about whether participation in the WBC is courting injury. And then, suddenly … there’s a baseball player! He’s holding a bat! Some other baseball player throws a ball at him, and some outcome occurs! And sweet baby jesus, someone records the result and puts it on the internet. I just want to love it and hug it and call it George.

But I shouldn’t. Because you know I know that spring training statistics are dumb. So as a reminder to myself, I went back to last year’s spring training statistics and compared them with the regular season marks. Et voila:

It’s like Votto and Rolen got into a crazy baseball-skills-switching device. But they couldn’t switch back, and then they had to find two extra people to have them get back in the correct bodies. Also,  Wilson Valdez looked like an acceptably horrible hitter. Stubbs looked liked he could hit a baseball! Oh, the magic of 20 meaningless plate appearances.

Pitchers can be a little different:

Well, and maybe it’s just our hitters, but clearly pitching CAN be bad for everyone across the board in ST. So there’s no need to worry about spring training numbers, just about how we’re going to handle Chapman pitching in the rotation. Hurray!