You're My Only Reason, You're My Only Truth

Eleven and a half hours until the first spring training game. If you were to ask me how excited I am for this, it would be somewhere between getting ready for a first kiss with a girl and finding the tootsie roll bank in my Christmas stocking, a symbol and manifestation of the goodness that is Christmas. (Side bar: I would say that nine out of ten Christmases, it's all about the tootsie roll bank. Everything else is secondary to those sweet, chocolatey sugar globules. If you ever think to yourself, "What can I get Rick for [insert whatever]?" The answer is tootsie rolls. Or caramels.)
Yes I realize that these games mean absolutely nothing to the season other than getting a look at the prospects, but it's baseball. More than that, it's where I came to love the game. I was eight, and the Marlins had just been established. Fortunately, their spring facility was just twenty minutes away. Even more fortunately, my best friend got season tickets, four rows behind the third base dugout. Their father is a doctor, and so his ticket was almost always unused due to almost all spring training games starting at 1pm. That quickly became my ticket. Box 12, row 4, seat 6. Mine. All mine. I like to think that there is still an impression in the plastic seat from my pre-pubescent posterior. Can we just say that there is? Yep, we can. It's there.
Seeing the guys on the baseball cards in real life, took baseball from a mythical activity only see on the TV to something I could be a part of. I saw Johnny Damon, Tom Glavine, and Bobby Bonilla. I got my first foul ball off the bat of the great Terry Pendleton. The game became a part of me. Really, you can go ahead and mark the moment when I gave my soul to the rawhide gods when I picked up that foul ball. Sure, I had been following baseball for two years prior; checking box scores, watching sportscenter highlights, seeing an occasional White Sox game on WGN. Heck, by then I had two little league trophies on my shelf. But now, the big leagues became tangible.
This was my only exposure to professional ball until I caught my first regular season game when I was 16 or so and somehow convinced my dad and older sister to go to a Giants-Cardinals game in San Fran. I still don't know how that worked, but it did. Twice in fact that trip. And then, to top matters off, while flying back home, who do we run into at the airport: Willie Mays. I'm not making this up. I've met the "Say Hey Kid". Shook his hand and talked about his daughter. Even had him sign my ticket. I've been impressed when meeting only a handful of people. They are, in no particular order: Elder Russell M. Nelson, Richard E. Rich (the guy behind the animated Book of Mormon tapes), and Willie Mays. That's really it.
So basically, church, church, baseball. That's my priorities. Church is year round, so I don't get too excited about sacrament meeting. General Conference, a little, but not a lot. Spring Training, Opening Day, Trade Deadline, BYU Home Opener- these are days that I would argue should be holidays. You want me to miss this? You better have a fantastic reason. I've canceled appointments, skipped classes and re-planned dates to make them happen.
So, am I excited for tomorrow's slate of games? Sure, I guess. If marking the anniversary of the only passion that has never let me down, enjoying the only thing that always satisfies, anticipating seven months of following my beloved Chisox is exciting, then yeah, I guess I'm excited. Word.