There’s positive energy surrounding tomorrow’s Yankees baseball game, but there’s awful news.

Things feel much more positive than this time last year.

The streets are covered in melted slush, the final remnants of last week’s two snowfalls. The temperature registers a high of forty degrees, and rain is expected to scatter itself throughout the day. Thanks to this miserable weather, New York City feels dark and gloomy, and although March is just a week away, it feels like George R.R. Martin will publish A Dream of Spring long before spring arrives in the tri-state area.

And yet, today is in many ways the final day of winter: for tomorrow, a thousand miles to the south, the New York Yankees play baseball.

Oh sure, sure, it’s just spring training baseball, with lineups likely filled with prospects and journeymen, and it won’t even be televised (seriously, how is that still a thing in 2024?), but starting tomorrow, the Yankees will play a game almost every day until at least the end of September, and hopefully well into October. Pinstripe Alley will be filled with game recaps, highlight shows will be filled with the best of baseball, and both bloggers and the comments section will fervently discuss what is, not what will be.

When I think back 365 days, it’s hard to imagine just how different this spring has felt. Last year, the Yankees were coming off a season that, on paper, seemed pretty good: they won 99 games in 2022 and made the ALCS. But heading into the spring, the vibes weren’t exactly great. 99 wins for a team that in the first half was drawing 1998 comparisons was a major disappointment, and the team was so bad during August a historic collapse was not out of the question. They barely squeaked by a Cleveland team, then fell flat on their face in the ALCS against an Astros team that had spun a combined no-hitter against them earlier in the year — an embarrassment that, in many ways, that team never recovered from.

Ignoring the sour end to the season that exposed a number of flaws, the front office basically ran it back in 2023. Just a few months after saying that the team needed two outfielders, implicitly suggesting that Aaron Hicks and Oswaldo Cabrera were not real options to start in left field, Brian Cashman brought the team into spring training with the pair competing for the starting left field job. Recognizing that the team’s offensive production in the first half of 2022 was the result of a lack of injuries and Matt Carpenter randomly turning into Barry Bonds for two months, fans and writers wondered if the

Yankees had a good enough lineup. And that’s before the injuries hit the pitching staff, and the outfield, and the bullpen … and that’s just talking about preseason injuries! There was only one fun throughline throughout last spring, and that was the battle for the shortstop job between Anthony Volpe and Oswald Peraza (and, theoretically, Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Oswaldo Cabrera, too).