Ah, spring training. There is no other time of the baseball season like it.
        Everything, and everybody, is fresh and new. The sun is shining, there is nary a cloud in the sky -- and the Tigers are unbeaten, untied, and unscored-upon.
        The manager is relaxed (he even has a balcony outside his hotel suite on which he can smoke), the players are all smiling, and the field at Marchant Stadium is an immaculate shade of green.
        Optimism abounds. Last season’s debacle is ancient history.
        Each day, the fans eagerly gather outside the clubhouse and line the walkway to the adjacent practice fields with pens and photos and baseballs in hand as if last summer never happened.
        It is time to begin anew.
        No steroid scandal here. The A-Rod mess seems a million a miles away.
        The Indians, like the Red Sox before them, have abandoned nearby Winter Haven. The Dodgers are gone from fabled Vero Beach. The American League champion Rays have moved their spring training base out of Al Lang Field, leaving St. Petersburg without a spring training tenant for the first time in nearly a century.
        But the Tigers and the cozy Central Florida city of Lakeland are beginning their 73rd year together, the longest-running spring training marriage in baseball.
        Spring training is, indeed, a blissful time.