Before the purpose-pitch that zips inches from the batter's head, before greenfly autograph seekers stalk hotel lobbies, before hateful sports talk radio jockies spill their venom, before thousands of fans stand up and boo in 50,000-seat stadiums, before the proverbial dog days of summer and the pressure-packed moments of October . . . There is sweet spring. The long hello. Baseball's early season.

Spring training. It's a simple, two-word phrase with connotations guaranteed to lift the spirits of anyone who loves baseball. Spring training means renewal. It is baseball's New Year. Just as Roman Catholics purge sins with confession and contrition, baseball players report to Florida and Arizona with clean slates, full of infinite hope and potential.

Pitchers are 0-0 with ERAs of 0.00. Hitters have zero strikeouts and no runners left in scoring position. Thirty major league teams are undefeated. Back in the frozen north, innocent fans think maybe this will be the year for the woebegone Kansas City Royals, Montreal Expos, Pittsburgh Pirates, and, of course, Boston Red Sox. It's OK to dream in February. Some teams are never as good as they are before the games actually start.

No other professional sport has anything like it. Football, basketball, and hockey have exhibition seasons, tuneups that they insist on calling "preseasons." In truth, these are merely conditioning/attrition boot camps, usually held very near the city where the team plays during the regular season.

The self-important National Football League's version is the worst. Sadistic coaches run dozens of players through two-a-day drills in summer heat designed to induce cramping, vomiting, and dehydration. Occasionally, a player dies from the workouts. Only the strongest and fittest NFL mastodons survive to play in the four phony preseason games, which bloated NFL owners make part of tier season-ticket packages.

Where football's early season is controversial, hockey and basketball preseasons are merely forgettable, lacking all form of ritual and tradition. Teams train in relative secrecy, usually staying close to home. Fringe players are run in and out of camp like so much human chattel, and only the most devout fans pay mind to early cuts and game results.

Contrast that with baseball spring training. Hardball's early season is a six-week, laid-back warm-up followed by legions of retirees and vacationers, many of whom wait to inspect Grapefruit and Cactus schedules before they plan their February-March trips. My favorite moment comes after the first full-team meeting, which is usually followed by one lap around the warning track before the ballplayers commence with stretching and drills. That's right - one grueling lap, an appropriate juxtaposition when measured against the preseason drills that go with football, basketball, and hockey.

Legitimate year-round conditioning by most modern baseball players has rendered much of spring training obsolete, of course, but few people are calling for the early season to be shortened. In fact, the baseball boom of the last 20 years (too often interrupted by those nasty work stoppages) has transformed spring training into a cottage industry for franchise owners. In 2002 The Wall Street Journal reported that spring training generated an economic impact of $600 million. Preseason ticket sales were running 20 percent higher than in 2001.

But the surge in spring training popularity is not an entirely positive development. The average spring crowd is only 6,000 fans and the entire spring season draws a little more than 2.5 million fans, but it's become difficult to score tickets in too many spring sites. In places like Tampa (Yankees), Fort Myers (Red Sox), Kissimmee (Braves), and Peoria, Arizona (Mariners and Padres), this loss of the spontaneous ticket purchase has sucked some of the charm from the early season.

Still, spring provides relief from a winter of hardball news focused on labor, arbitration, ballplayer relocation, trade speculation and other forms of player transaction. The hot stove season keeps the fires burning, but too much of it is muddied by money and litigation.

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More than any game, baseball is about anticipation. Players know. Fans know.

True seamheads are trained to be suspicious of those who believe baseball is too slow. It's supposed to be slow. That's the point. Don't trust those who tell you they hate baseball because it's slow. People who prefer "action" sports - linear games, governed by clocks, with steady progressions to the goal - are more likely to be shallow. Deep thinkers are better able to appreciate baseball, and it is this level of thought that plays to the beauty of spring training.

Nothing in pro sports is more steeped in anticipation than baseball's spring season. It is believed that the expression "hope springs eternal" was first coined sometime early in the 20th century by a baseball scribe on the take eating free food and drinking the ball club's booze while staying in a luxury St. Petersburg hotel room supplied by the ball club he was covering.

Predictability is another one of the odd comforts of spring training. There are annual stories that make the world right for longtime baseball fans. No self-respecting major league spring camp would be complete without at least one star veteran who arrives late, plus the obligatory Latin American ballplayer who is detained because of visa problems.

Racetracks, card games, and hotel bars are also ubiquitous elements of spring training. Ball club owners in the old days liked to think of spring as a time for players to dry out, but drinking generally increased once the fellows reunited at training camp. Money changed hands regularly at poker games, and spring training has been a friend of Florida racetracks for more than a century. Former Red Sox manager Don Zimmer, a baseball lifer for more than a half-century, stalks the tracks wherever he goes and Yankee manager Joe Torre happily rides sidecar with Zimm. Even the scribes get involved. A reporter covering a team in Jupiter, Florida, in the spring of 2002 made $45,000 in a single night at the local racetrack.

But more than anything, spring training promotes hope and inspires action at the box office. This is what keeps spring training going for six long weeks. Pitchers take longer than hitters to get their arms ready for the big league season, but in this age of huge money and year-round conditioning, baseball players no longer need a month and a half to prepare.

Prior to free agency, many baseball players got real jobs during the off-season. In mid-December, you could bump into your local team's relief pitcher selling fishing rods on the floor of a Sears department store. Players who didn't get jobs usually added 15 pounds giving speeches-for-hire on the rubber chicken circuit. These players would show up in Florida and Arizona and run themselves back into condition. That could take six weeks.

The New Yorker's Roger Angell, one of the first to chronicle the charms of spring training, wrote, "Players are what you go to watch in the spring; teams don't begin to emerge until summer."

Spring training.

By Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe Staff

This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on 2/2/2003.

Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.