It always starts before I’m ready for it, and then it sticks around. And it keeps going every day for about 7 months (except for Wednesday and Thursday of this particular week, actually). It doesn’t go away until I’m tired of it and spending most of my time thinking about football.

More than any other sport, it’s just…there. I don’t mean that it’s like wallpaper, although I’m sure some people feel that way. I mean that I could put my head down and concentrate on work for a week, come home, turn on NESN at 7:05 ET, and the Red Sox would be playing. You could take off on a Friday night for a 9-day Caribbean vacation, turn your cell phone off, forget about the world entirely, come back late on the tail end of the weekend, and catch the last three innings of Sunday Night Baseball.

I don’t mean to be sentimental. God knows there are enough people who romanticize the sport, treat great players like they’re deities, and find ways to be obnoxiously sanctimonious when discussing a game that many of us started to play at the age of 6. But it does distinguish itself from other sports that compete for our attention.

Football was my first love. I don’t know who decided that football starts at the beginning of September, but it was a smart choice, at least for my money. Growing up, I remember it as one of the only things about the fall that counteracted the dread that accompanied the start of the school year. But football has historically made us wait all week for it, to its benefit (although the NFL has recently distanced itself from this positive attribute with its foray into weekly Thursday Night Football). It’s a weekend game, designed to increase our appreciation of time spent away from daily routine.

Professional basketball and hockey are near identical in their design: they start in mid-autumn, run until late spring, and have 82 regular season games and 4 playoff rounds of 7-game series. But they also have the least predictable schedules. Are the Celtics playing on the third Wednesday of the season? I have no idea. The NBA usually has a full slate booked on Fridays, but other than that, the only thing I can tell you is that there are 4 games on Christmas Day. Don’t even bother asking me about the NHL – I don’t have a clue.

But you can set your watch to baseball. Is it 9 p.m.? The Red Sox are probably playing. And if they’re not, someone else is. And because of that regularity, baseball is there for you. No matter what you have going on in your life, you can count on it (a certain strike in 1994 notwithstanding) on a daily basis. The players you look up to will fade, and then your ability to play yourself will follow or lapse into dormancy, and then players younger than you will begin to retire. But baseball will still be there for you, in one way or another.

What it looks like over Cleveland right now. Probably.

For the 2nd time in 4 days, a Red Sox game has been postponed. CLEVELAND!!!

It’s also 1:43 in the morning right now, so I’m going to try to keep this short and sweet. Just a couple things to go over.

• John Farrell has decided to run through the full rotation for the first go-around despite the most recent postponement. That means we’re getting Joe Kelly (somehow a #3 starter!), Rick Porcello, and Steven Wright for the next 3 games in Toronto and oh shit, it’s like I slipped into a fever dream from summer 2015. On the one hand, maybe it’s a good decision for continuity purposes and to get everyone into the swing of things. On the other hand, Farrell is basically flipping a coin with Wright rather than handing the ball to David Price for the Toronto series finale. And on the other other hand, the Sox will now use their ace in the home opener at Fenway. IT’S A CONSPIRACY, MAN. JOHN HENRY CONTROLS THE WEATHER.
• There’s either not much to say yet about this team, or I’m really tired, or both. I just stared at the screen for 2 minutes while yawning and chuckling to myself about Pablo Sandoval being 0 for 1 so far this year.
• RICH HILL UPDATE: Dude had a tough first day. He hit Adam Eaton with the first pitch of the game. Then he hit Jose Abreu later in the inning. And he got through that without giving up a run, and he had a clean 2nd inning, but then he gave up a triple, a single, and a double, and there were 2 errors (one by Hill), and he got yanked. Not his best, but I’m not convinced he’s out of gas yet.
• I was going to come up with good, bad, and ugly sections, but I can’t think of anything notable to say for good and bad. So I’ll just do…
• UGLY: I still haven’t written anything about the infielders, so both of our fans will have to wait until the weekend for my EXPERT INSIGHTS.

Well, at least Brock is happy to see us again. (Boston Herald/Matt Stone)

Welp. We may have dropped the ball a little bit over the offseason. Fortunately for us, we have a readership of almost zero, so no harm done, really. But hey, it’s baseball season again, and that means literally months of slogging through the middle innings of games that are already hopelessly out of reach. FEEL THE EXCITEMENT.

In all seriousness, though, this year’s version of the Red Sox can’t possibly be worse than the 2015 edition (right?). So Lefty and Righty are back to bring you all the Red Sox analysis you can handle, and if last year’s output is any indication, probably much more than you would ever actually want. But wait! Can you expect changes from Lefty and Righty this year? Maybe! Changes may include:

• A shift away from game-by-game recaps. I know, you’re pretty broken up that we won’t be delving into the minutiae of every single Red Sox game this season. How will you cope? But this means more time to think about the content we want to post and less of me waking up at 3:15 in the morning slouched over my laptop. It’s a win-win. Look for posts for each series instead of every game from now on.
• We’ll pay you to read our website! Just kidding. I’m actually not even sure that would work.
• More roster analysis. Especially because Boston’s success this year is going to have a lot to do with its roster construction.
• Less Don Orsillo. Sigh.
• More Rich Hill analysis. Yes, I know he’s on the A’s now. But I’ve been saying that the Sox were idiots all winter not to re-sign him, and he’s gone ahead and walked 12 batters and given up 10 hits over 7 and 2/3 innings in spring training, and I need to find out if I’m an idiot or what.
• More blogs about other Boston teams. The Celtics are super fun to watch, the Bruins are going to make the playoffs, and the NFL Draft is coming up. So you can, at the very least, expect us to deliver some uninformed content about the hockey playoffs.

In terms of what you can expect over the next week, we’ll break down the roster once it’s been finalized, and we’ll have a preview of Boston’s first series of the season, a 3-game trip to Cleveland. And then we just write a few more posts, bingo bango, we’re famous. Should be fun!