The Major League Baseball season doesn’t end anymore. It dies.

Sometimes, in a lingering, suffocating fashion, as it did last year when over five games the sport slowly slipped beneath the oceanic payrolls of the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers in a World Series that drowned any shred of purity and opportunity and serendipity.

Still, somehow, every year, as the earth’s axis starts to tilt toward the sun, baseball reemerges.

Even better, it does so here. In Arizona.

Spring training is as close as Major League Baseball gets to........

© Arizona Republic