A Season For Hope | Defector
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This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Feb 18.
In his second collection of recollections and reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the physicist Richard Feynman begins his book with the following anecdote:
I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty.
Feynman can see the externality of the flower, perhaps not to the level of refinement that his trained friend can, but his scientific background also unlocks other aspects, no less beautiful, on the cellular and molecular levels. “There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
Over the past quarter century baseball went through its own crisis of aesthetics between the artists and the scientists, and while the situation has mostly resolved, there are still some moments of friction. Still, February belongs to the artists, the beat writers. Pitchers and catchers have reported, and there’s no shortage of reporting: old friends and familiar smiles, familiar storylines, familiar quotes. Blurry photos that perfectly capture the spirit of something indistinct, emotional. February baseball is in the best shape of its life, but there are no scales to weigh on: Mathematics isn’t allowed onto the complex yet. Once the games begin, analysis will sneak past the turnstiles, ignoring the box scores but feeding on the radar guns, the pitch mixes, and the high-speed cameras.
There will be a point in March, indistinguishable except in retrospect, where a switch is flipped, the slope reaches zero. And then, baseball will mean something again.
A week ago, the Toronto Blue Jays signed Phillippe Aumont to a minor-league contract. This is the same Aumont whom the Mariners drafted in the first round back in the Bush administration, one pick after Madison Bumgarner and three before Jason Heyward. Ignoring the players who were drafted but elected college (like the Rockies and Chris Sale), only four other men from that entire draft signed and are still active: Freddie Freeman, Giancarlo Stanton, Travis d’Arnaud, and Hunter Strickland. Everyone else has had their rise and fall, completed their stories.
Aumont last threw a major-league pitch in 2015, with the Phillies. And that’ll continue to be true, because he isn’t reporting to camp. The signing was purely an administrative one, the opposite of all those one-day “retired as a member of the team” contracts that have proliferated the sport. The 37-year-old is pitching for Team Canada in the upcoming World Baseball Classic, and in order to do so, he has to unretire. The last time he pitched was in the same uniform, for the 2023 WBC, when he threw three innings, striking out and walking four. He sat 92 on the radar gun, then returned to retirement, living as a farmer in Quebec.
But if Aumont isn’t interested in the redemption arc, there are plenty of men willing to undergo the trials. John Means will miss the 2026 season after tearing his Achilles tendon in December, but he’s in camp with the Royals, already dreaming of 2027 glory. Accompanying him is Aaron Sanchez, last seen in the majors at a time when Means was still a healthy pitcher. Out of baseball in 2025, Sanchez looked sharp in the Dominican Winter League, posting a 1.55 ERA and walking just 5% of batters. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll translate. Michael Fulmer is with the Giants, still searching for a workaround to his eternal arm problems, still offering his usual doggedness in training. Craig Kimbrel signed a minor-league contract with the Mets in January, hoping to put aside the nagging injuries that interfered with the All-Star’s attempts at reinvention.
It probably won’t end well. Twentieth-century sportswriting was awash in these types of stories, written for fans who’d been impatiently waiting for next year. Every new team was a clean slate, and even the mediocre compilations, lacking in quality, could boast an excess of quantity, kids with fresh faces, kids who hadn’t yet learned how to fail. The stories still get written—the pages, few as they are these days, demand ink. There’s always a new pitch, the sweeper or the death ball or the kick-change, or a new way of combining them together, even as it’s starting to feel like we’re running out of ways to combine the same four chords.
The stories are still told, but we no longer believe them as well as we once did. We’re better at following up, at connecting the Kimbrel of February to the Kimbrel of August. The dream of the 99th-percentile outcome still exists, though it feels like we see it more in the form of the career year by the established star, rather than the face out of nowhere. We had a few rags-to-riches stories, or at least, rags-to-cost-controlled-value stories: journeyman middle reliever Jimmy Herget defied the longest odds imaginable by being good for the 2025 Colorado Rockies (2.48 ERA in 83 ⅓ innings), while Rule 5 pick Mike Vasil was sold, then waived, and then put together one of the 25 best reliever seasons of the decade by rWAR (2.9) under the shadows of Chicago’s 102 losses. But as unqualified as these successes were, we can still qualify them: Herget’s DRA- was 98 last year, Vasil’s 102.
Feynman believed he could see the beauty on the outside of the flower and on the inside. (He admits, in typical Feynman candor, that there’s no way to tell if he actually does.) He couldn’t understand why anyone else couldn’t. But with respect to the man, the quote feels a little like the apocryphal story of Ted Williams as a coach, wondering why everyone didn’t just hit like Ted Williams. It is difficult to see the inside and the outside, the March and the October, all at the same time. Not impossible, but it demands real mental effort, like counting cards or remembering names at a party. Once you start seeing things a certain way, you tend to start thinking a certain way, seeing the world through its bounding boxes. Some people are really good at counting cards, and some people are really good at remembering names. A fortunate few are both.
The surprises are still there, if not perhaps as legendary as the days of Gehrig vs. Pipp. Teams still surprise. George Springers do get healthy. It’s not really the baseball itself that’s the problem, just the mythologizing of it. As the talent level of major-league baseball increases, the difference between hero and guy are finer than ever, leading to drama just as effective, if somewhat less grand in scale. Everyone is already a hero now; they no longer need to come out of nowhere. Modern baseball has done damage to its regular season, but nothing compared to what analytics have done to spring training. We still keep statistics, but they’re almost laid out like traps for the novice.
The safest bet for March is to part ways with spring training—the allure fades after a week or two anyway—and accompany Aumont to the World Baseball Classic. It’s a land where Feynman’s microscopes no longer work: The statistics are meaningless, the peripherals can never rise to the surface. All that matters is the bloom of the flower itself, the score of the game in front of you, the pitcher (Vance Worley) and batter (Dante Bichette Jr.) directly in opposition. It takes a little time and labor to properly contextualize a new league, for those who haven’t explored into the computer name generation of college baseball, or the science-fiction, fluorescent-glow late nights of the KBO.
But it’s worth it. Sometimes it’s fine to enjoy something on one level, in one tense, without having to worry about subtext, or permutation, or regression. There’s still a chance for the truly anonymous to become heroes, however fleeting. Enjoy March, and the MLB will be waiting for you in April. You’ll have plenty of storylines, and statistical noise, to sort through then.
