Today is the big day! Royals pitchers and catchers report to spring training in Surprise, Arizona:

Next Monday, the balance of the team reports:

To help get you in the spring training mood, here is a piece that aired on NPR’s Morning Edition, sent to me by Hot Stove reader Nancy Gaba:

The day has dawned to hear again the happiest words in sports

Not “Touchdown!”  “Home run!”  “Goal!” or “Score!” but “Pitchers and Catchers report.”

“Pitchers and catchers report…”  Such news: concise, flat, stark and grand.

It means the game is afoot again, alive once more in the land.

Oh, it’ll snow, and cars will stall, and sleet will rattle our nights,

And roundball and hockey will drag us through the playoffs and the fights:

But somewhere than just in the mind’s eye now the motions of baseball start:

Maybe it’s only playing catch, but catch is good for the heart,

And good for the soul, and the arms and the legs, and the head full of off-season talk

About bar fights and contracts, recalcitrant umpires, and players too eager to squawk

About vicious injustices, real or imagined, and teams that don’t love them enough 

Enough!  Time to relish, instead of this filler, returning to all the good stuff

In Tucson and Phoenix, in Tampa and Lakeland they’re picking up baseballs for real,

and tossing them happily into their gloves, and secretly thinking, “Some deal,”

To be gathered again here to stretch in the sun, and scratch, and get loose in the grass,

To try not to smile in spite of yourself at the best of times coming to pass.

It won’t stop the wars, and it won’t fill the bellies of children who’ve lost their relief;

It won’t house the homeless or patch up the bridges or soften the heart of the thief.

Still, we can, in this moment and lifetime of trouble, clutch words that might offer a sort

Of surcease from the madness that hammers us daily; hence, “Pitchers and catchers report.”

Roger Angell: Roger Angell, now 95 years old, is a long-time editor and essayist for the New Yorker, and his reputation is strongly tied to his poetic description of baseball. As I was recuperating from some outpatient surgery this past week, I spent some quality time with the Angell books in my baseball library. Since 1962, he has written baseball essays for the New Yorker, and it is safe to say that a great number of them are masterpieces. Many have been packaged as books every few years, and these are on my shelf:

                                                        

The Summer Game, 1962-1972

Five Seasons, 1972-1976

Late Innings, 1977-1981

Season Ticket, 1983-1987

Game Time, a mix from 1962 to 2002.

As you likely noticed from my playoff posts, the nonagenarian Angell is still thankfully writing about baseball. Here is a reminder of what he said after the classic 14-inning first game of the 2015 World Series:

“…a painstakingly built 3-1 Metsian lead; a retaliatory two-run Royals sixth, which finished Harvey; another Mets run after an error by first baseman Eric Hosmer; and an astounding, one-out ninth-inning tying home run by Alex Gordon, against the near-impregnable Mets closer Jeurys Familia, who hadn’t blown a save since July 30. Three changes of lead, three retying comebacks? A lovely game, a sparkler, with plenty of fielding gems to light it up. My scorecard showed five circled plays, the best one being Mike Moustakas’ spinning grab and throw on a shot by the Mets’ Wilmer Flores, which saved another run.

 

A lovely thing that now drooped and yawned its way through four more scoreless innings while Eastern Daylight Time moms and dads went to bed or didn’t, and their school-night kids fell asleep beside their under-the-cover smartphones, and pitchers came and went and grew elderly. The last two verticals were the Royals’ thirty-six-year-old Chris Young and the Mets’ forty-two-year-old Bartolo Colon, with Colon the loser at last – or rather the Royals the winners – after a throwing error by David Wright, a single to right field, an intentional walk, and a cleansing, game-winning sac fly by Hosmer.”

After the 2015 Series was over, and although he was rooting for his hometown Mets, he saw why people “fell in love with these Royals in their near-thing debut in the World Series last fall…there’s a collective élan to them, a bearded joy in their work, that you want to be part of.” Amen.

In 2014, at age 93, Angell gained new acclaim for an essay on his experience with aging. “This Old Man” is required reading for those of us noticing that not all body parts move the same as before (see above, outpatient surgery). Click here. Although not a baseball piece, the essay is not void of baseball references, as obvious from the opening paragraph:

Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the KGB. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.  

“This Old Man” also lends its name to Angell’s new book collection of New Yorker essays. In a nice surprise, a copy of the book showed up on my desk. Knowing my admiration for Angell, Hot Stove reader Stanley Bushman (an ageless 87 himself) made this old man’s day with his gift.

“The Catch”:  Hot Stove reader Pat McInerney sent this follow-up story on “The Catch” by Willie Mays. Pat says he has an unusual attachment to the story because his dad thought it was one of the funniest stories he’s ever heard, and when Pat tells or thinks about the story, he hears his dad laughing his great laugh.

The setting was Game 1 of the 1954 Giants-Indians World Series at the Polo Grounds. The score was tied 2-2 in the top of the 8^th inning. The Giants right-handed starter Sal Maglie had men on first and second and no outs. With lefty Vic Wertz coming to bat, manager Leo Durocher brought in left-hander Don Liddle to pitch. On a 2-1 count, Wertz crushed a Liddle fastball to deep center. Mays, who’d been playing in, turned on a dead run straight toward the wall. At full speed and over his left shoulder, Mays made one of baseball’s most historic catches. Durocher immediately replaced Liddle with right-hander Marv Grissom to face the next batter, a right-hander. As Liddle left the mound, he tossed the ball to Grissom and said “Well, I got my man.”

[Some trivia on these players. “Sal the Barber” Maglie was so called because he shaved the batters by throwing high and tight. Coincidentally, he also had a five o’clock shadow. Vic Wertz once hit a ball that was described as one that would have been a home run in any park, including Yellowstone. In the season after Mays caught his blast in the World Series, Wertz played only 74 games before being stricken with polio. He came back in 1956 and hit 32 homers with 106 RBI’s.]

 

“Another Catch”: I commented to Pat that I had seen a catch that was just as good (or better) at Royals Stadium. Of course, this catch is not as well known since the game was not on the national stage of the World Series. As it turned out, Pat had also been at that game on June 10, 1997. It’s not that we have the date memorized – we just need to Google “Jim Edmonds catch” and the first thing is a video of what we saw in that Royals/Angels game. Edmonds was playing a shallow center field with light-hitting David Howard at the plate for the Royals. Howard surprised everyone with a blast to deep center, but the bigger surprise was that Edmonds, at full speed and with his neck craned back to follow the ball, dived and made the catch in mid-air facing the wall. As Pat points out, it is arguably better than the Mays catch because Edmonds had to leave his feet to reach the ball. The Royals fans knew they had seen something special and, as you will hear in the video, loudly voiced their appreciation. So, you compare: Willie and Edmonds.

“Yet Another Catch”:  Edmonds collected his first gold glove the year he made that Kansas City catch, and he went on to win a total of eight with the Angels and Cards. The current center fielder for the Angels is Mike Trout who is maybe the best hitter in baseball and also generally up for Gold Glove consideration. To date, no Gold Glove, but he may have made the most replayed catch of 2015 (click here).

Based on a vote from fans, Topps selected Trout to be the player on its #1 baseball card for 2016. The choice for the image was not Trout with his potent bat, but the catch:

PECOTA: Baseball Prospectus, via its PECOTA projection system, famously predicted the Royals would win 72 games in 2015. The Royals won 95. BP predicts 76 wins for the Royals in 2016, and if the same margin of error applies, the Royals will win 99. I was going to write about this, but Joe Posnanski just posted and says it so much better (click here). I’ll add some trivia. PECOTA stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. But Nate Silver, the sabermetricians who originally developed PECOTA, coined the name from utility

man Bill Pecota, a Royals player who was a repeated nemesis to Silver’s team, the Detroit Tigers. After his baseball life, Silver became well known for his political predictions on his FiveThirtyEight blog. So PECOTA is a “backronym” – the word came first and then Nate put together sabermetric terms to match the letters of the name. Bill Pecota played for the Royals from 1986 to 1991 and does not agree with PECOTA on its Royals predictions.

The Oscars: Rita and I have been to the Telluride Film Festival the last five years, and by some wonderful luck, the first four included what became the best picture winner (The Artist, Argo, 12 Years a Slave and Birdman). To keep our streak alive, Spotlight will need to beat out the other seven nominees for the Oscar this year. We may be guilty of Telluride bias, but we have seen all eight nominees and still believe Spotlight is the best. We thought Revenant was more brutal than good, and while we can agree that Leonard DiCaprio had the most painstaking role, my personal choice would be Bryan Cranston as Trumbo. Room and Carol are other films from Telluride, and either lead actress would be worthy of the Oscar – Brie Larson or Cate Blanchett. Also really liked Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn.  My supporting actor would be Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight, but not unhappy if it goes to Sylvester Stallone for Creed. On supporting actress, either Rooney Mara in Carol or Rachel McAdams in Spotlight. There is buzz for Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl, but we have not yet seen the movie. We did like her in Ex Machina. Want some odds? See Nate Sliver’s website. See you at the Oscars on Sunday night, February 28.

 

Coming Up in Hot Stove: Best all-time shortstop; Spring training at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg; and The Players Tribune.