Impatiently Waiting...

Still no word from MASN as to when they might actually decide to televise their raison d'être this spring, despite two e-mails and a blog comment on the the MASN website, which, like the network itself, looks decidedly second-rate.

In stark contrast, however, is my native New England team's network, NESN, which televised the first workout. As hungry as I am for spring baseball, I think Dan Shaughnessy captured this exploitation of Red Sox Nation much better than I could:

Trust me when I tell you that you have not lived until you've seen a solid hour of PFP – pitchers' fielding practice. This promises to do for television what 38 Pitches did for the blogosphere.

Speaking of Schilling, count me among the few that is not enamored with his online blatherings. With every post, he shows you just what a fine education he got from Yavapai Community College and Shadow Mountain High School.

Meanwhile, back in greater DC, the focus on baseball is still in the shadow of the Clemens-McNamee hearings, which made for great theater but didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Though I do suspect that somewhere deep in the hills of far western Massachusetts, Dan Duquette is smirking and wisely letting the likes of me say "told you so" for him.

There is some talk about a team that's about to flirt with .500, with a potential logjam at first base, and a farm system that's improved from among the very worst to roughly the middle of the pack, with a handful of guys that might make the jump like John Lannan did last summer.

But it takes some digging and sifting through the Deadskins detritus and the college basketball, which lost its luster for me when UMass was exposed to be no different than the rest in 1996, when Coach Cal and Marcus Camby both ran away for the NBA.

Um, position players report on Wednesday?!