Dealing With The Void...

"Baseball fans are generally a cheerful lot, at least between late February and late October. (Literary critic Jonathan Yardley says there are only two seasons: Baseball Season and The Void.)"
- George F. Will, Men At Work

There are essentially three ways to deal with the Void, other than Ralph Houk's idea of sitting and staring out the window until spring:

1) You can buy books and read about baseball. (Incidentally, in case I haven't already mentioned this, if you find a woman who will buy you books about baseball for Christmas or even for Valentine's Day, MARRY HER!)

B: You can follow all the minutae of free agent signings, waver wire transactions, trades, and libel suits (mostly between the Yankees and Red Sox).

iii. You can go to ESPN.com and read their Hot Stove Heaters, which are concise, insightful and well-written capsules of each MLB team's prospects for the coming Baseball Season. Their staff of writers takes turns writing the capsules for different teams, so you won't always be reading the same stuff, and you won't have as much of a bias as you might if it were done by an individual. Plus, they've been doing this every year since I was in college. Back then, I had to read these reports on my roommate's 486/25 w/4MB RAM, which is only about half a step up from that Flintstones' computer, with the miniature pterydactyl inside, pecking out instructions on a piece of slate.

Anyway, I recommend checking these out whenever you can, as they provide a nice synopsis of what's expected from and for each team next year. I'm putting a link for these on the right as well, in case you need it an can't seem to remember where ESPN.com's baseball page is.

Of course, this is still no excuse for not marrying a woman who buys you baseball books or making sure that you've read everything you can find about the Chicago White Sox hiring of Chris Cron as "bunting instructor" (honest!), but it's certainly more interesting than staring out the window waiting for the snow to melt.