The best shape ever

Here’s a guarantee: Several times within the next month, you will consume a news story—not even counting this blog post—asserting that a particular baseball player is Reporting to Spring Training in the Best Shape of His Life. Chances are, you will read several of these stories, because they are a rite of the baseball calendar, and because certain players do bust their butts during the offseason. When they reemerge into the public eye, ready for workouts, everybody notices the difference.

The invention of spring training stories about fitness coincided, best as I can tell, with the invention of February itself. Not that the accounts have always been positive. A 1932 story in the Post about aging “big moundsman” Fred Marberry included several quotes from team president Clark Griffith, who said, “[H]e is getting older, and takes on fat over his shoulders and around his stomach, and has trouble not only getting it off but keeping it off. Why, he gains a few pounds when he has two or three off-days. And this excess fat also prevents him from getting all of his stuff on the ball.”

The Best Shape of His Life article is in the best shape of its life.