Stoke up the hot stove, fat man!

I am not a patient man. And the recent weeks of inactivity on the Red Stockings front has made me irritable and ornery. My entreaty to the corpulent cigar chompers on Yawkey Way: Make some news for the boys in Boston with base-ball on the mind, the lads waiting on every tavern stool who want to know who next season's hurler-in-chief will be.

Winter is upon us, the snow a lily-white blanket keeping warm our fair emerald field in the Fens. But after the bottom of the ninth chapter, baseball does not vanish. It stalks the subconscious, waiting to be fed a diet of spinning horsehide and ash clouts. I beseech thee, Theodore Epstein, feed that hankering!