Spring Training is back in action and that means that roughly 80 or so players will be down in Arizona stretching, tanning, playing golf and occasionally playing some baseball while furiously scanning the crowd for ASU sorority girls to party with later that night.
At least, that's what the players with talent will be doing. The other 40 players will be doing their untalented damnedest to impress a coach with their picture perfect bunting mechanics, constant hustle and ability to get some hits off pitchers like Jim Parque and a bunch of fielders who are too busy scanning the crowd for ASU sorority girls to play defense.
None of this would irk me if there weren't people being paid to write about baseball. Unfortunately those people feel the compulsion to justify their paychecks by actually producing content unlike myself who is neither paid nor care about writing except when I feel like it.
The problem is, there's very little in the way of actually important events during Spring Training and yet all these stories and internet column inches need to be filled. Which leads us to the Spring Training fluff pieces. Honestly, if writers just started recycling their Spring Training articles from last year only with the names changed, a la Jeff's World Series preview, I am reasonably confident that nobody would notice. And anyone that would notice wouldn't care. And anyone that would care doesn't matter because they care about Spring Training stories. Get a hobby or something, yeesh.
Normally I just shrug off this whole farce and continue following more important things like hockey and the current wetness of some recently applied wall paint, but this year I decided to make a game of it on pure whim. So I created a buzzphrase bingo card for media fluff pieces. This has almost certainly been done before but a cursory web search that I did to try and find one that I could rip off proved unsuccessful. You could prove me wrong by finding one yourself but then you will have spent time searching the internet for a fake bingo card about Spring Training articles in order to show up somebody on the internet that you have never met, so really, I think I'll come out ahead here.
Anyways, here you go. Feel free to link to stories in the comments containing one of the sought after phrases. How long until we can blank out the whole card?
