No joy, etc.

I just hate -- hate -- that it was the Marlins again.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, another long, cold, dark offseason.

When I played baseball as a kid, I never quite got the game. It was a mystery to me, the whole rate of failure, the game in your head, the bounces, the inches, the judgment of the umpire. Football was my game, something straightforward, physical. Line up across another guy and try to knock the snot out of him. Baseball, I was too uptight to really let it it fly. And my mind wandered. Now, watching games, I prefer baseball to football in every way. The beauty, the rhythms, the day to day of it. Today football is a different game from the one I loved, a game of specialization and matchups and strategy, plugging players in and out for specific plays, situations. That's just boring and impersonal to me, a kid who soaked up the stories of the sixties Packers and Giants and Browns and Rams.

Anyway, even though I love baseball now, there are still things I just don't get. The biggest being that you just can't bend any given situation to your will, at least as a hitter. The game is just too big and crazy and mysterious to me. Football, I always felt like you had a little control over things, if only biggest there's always somebody waiting to be knocked down.

Anyway, the first, undisputed fact is the bullpen has to be rebuilt from the ground up. Maybe you keep a couple guys, I don't know, but most of them have to be gone.