SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- It is time for the annual rites of baseball. Spring training has no wrongs. The joy is back in Mudville. And in Scottsdale.

Winter recedes. The season approaches. Young men think about tomorrow. Older men reminisce about yesterday.

Spring training is the most enjoyable mass dream America ever had, Disney World with fungoes. Spring, when life is renewed, when a game is reborn. When no longer do we have to wait ‘til next year.

Possibilities loom like the Superstition Mountains far to the east, beyond the right field fence of Scottsdale Stadium. Possibilities and questions.

Is this really Manny Ramirez' last year with the Dodgers? Is Matt LaPorta ready to take over first for the Indians? Will Ben Sheets earn that $10 million he got from the Athletics?

Everyone's undefeated until April. Optimism is a way of life. The games don't matter. The mood certainly does.

March exhibitions, big crowds in small stadiums, memories of the way it used to be. Anything can happen. Sure, Yogi Berra told us that in baseball, "You don't know nothing,'' but we know good days are coming. In fact, they're always good days here.

We know back east the snow will be melting and the temperature rising, and summer is on the horizon, figuratively that is. Around Phoenix, in whatever direction you look, on the horizon there are buttes and peaks and Saguaro cacti.

Spring training may not give us all the answers, but it will give us all the reasons to seek them. It will give us the reassurance baseball has returned, and if it doesn't remain the National Pastime it remains a link to a different time.

It was back in the 19th Century the Chicago White Stockings, with a .248 hitter named Billy Sunday, the man who later as a preacher couldn't shut down Chicago, went to Hot Springs, Ark., to boil out a winter's debauchery and develop the muscle to knock off the Cincinnati Red Stockings.

Now, as fate and finance would have it, both the Chisox and the Reds are in Arizona, which with the addition of Cincy this year, has drawn equal with Florida, 15 teams apiece. Not all that long ago, the early 1990s, only six clubs were in Arizona. The difference is startling.

When the Dodgers, after a seeming lifetime in Vero Beach, finally moved to Arizona a year ago, it meant every Western franchise, Dodgers, Angels, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Giants, A's and Mariners were training in the West. How sensible.

How delightful, the labels, Cactus League, Grapefruit League, games with small kids playing on grass berms while their parents watch bigger older kids chase fly balls on the outfield grass.

Baseball. The author Pete Hammill said it simply and wonderfully a while back when the sport was simple and wonderful - "I'm from a generation,'' he wrote, "that forgives baseball everything.''

The world has changed from Hammill's boyhood. No paper moon hangs over a cardboard sea. Sometimes it seems civilization is hanging from a precipice. Peanuts and Cracker Jacks? Now people are buying everything from illegal substances to bills of goods. Will they still buy the dream?

"The whole history of baseball,'' said Bernard Malamud, who created "The Natural'' among his various novels, "has the quality of mythology.'' We know myths die. But here in the desert, as winter draws to a nasty close, baseball lives, baseball survives.

The Winter Olympics have captured many of us. A speech by Tiger Woods had the nation transfixed. Kevin Durant has become unstoppable for the Oklahoma City Thunder. But for many, with a cap on their heads and a fielder's glove on their hands, nothing quite matches up to baseball.

Nothing else has DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak or Nolan Ryan's record number of strikeouts. Nothing else has survived so many years with so few alterations.

Shortstops a century ago were throwing out runners by a step. Shortstops a century later are throwing out runners by a step. As the great Red Smith told us, "Ninety feet home plate and first base may be the closest man has come to perfection.''

Baseball mostly is a sport of imperfection, at least at the plate. Fail two out of every three times, and you still hit .333, an All-Star figure. What we're trying to figure is who can do that, if anyone can do that. Trying to figure who is going emerge and grab the headlines, along with a few line drives. It's time for speculation. Time for verification. Time for spring training.