Alfonso Soriano needs 28 home runs to reach 400 for his career. (USA Today Sports)

MESA, Ariz. – After a week of sun, warmth and unfiltered spring promise, Wednesday morning here broke dank and gloomy. Rather than creep toward something like renewal, the season had withdrawn into a condition of icy mush, with no explanation other than, well, wait, there it is, through the windshield wipers on the road ahead, "Winter Home of the Chicago Cubs."

The poor Cubs, 101-game losers, 100-and-something-year losers, couriers of wind, rain, cold and the slog of another rebuild.

Keeps going like this, Dale Sveum will go hunting with Robin Yount again next winter, this time wearing a full quail suit.

Actually, it's maybe not that bad. Probably.

We're pretty sure the Cubs are front-office smart, have the money to match the organizational plan, believe in the plan and one day will have the major league players around whom the plan presumably is … planned. Until then, they'll have stuff like 2012 happen, where they spent $108 million for 101 losses, traded away Ryan

Hyun-Jin Ryu signed a $36 million contract with the Dodgers. (AP)

GLENDALE, Ariz. – So, there's a bit of a mix-up on the schedule. It reads that Hyun-Jin Ryu should be throwing, like right now, on the field over there. But he's standing, waiting for Zack Greinke to finish, on this field here, and a guy in a golf cart is offering to run Ryu over there.

Except, and these things happen, Ryu is thinking the mound is only, like, 50 feet away and it really would be no problem just to walk halfway across the infield. Sure, there had been some wind sprints and a side session in the bullpen, but he was quite sure he was still capable of carrying himself another 50 feet. You know, if the great (and significantly older) Greinke walked it then he himself should be able to walk it, too.

So, the guy in the cart is asking in English if he's sure he doesn't want a ride to the other field and Ryu is saying in Korean he'll be fine getting himself to this mound right here, when at precisely the same moment they both realize they were running parallel planes

MARYVALE, Ariz. – Bobby Crosby was coming up on his 33rd birthday, two whole seasons out of the game, his golf handicap down to a plus-1, his wife and father starting to drop hints.

Bobby Crosby is in the Brewers' camp this spring after two years out of baseball. (USA Today Sports)Like, "Hey, Bobby, thinking about going back and playing baseball at all?"

Subtle like that.

He'd thought he'd moved on. A game that was so good to him for so long, through Cal State Long Beach and the first round of the 2001 draft, a couple minor-league seasons and the American League Rookie of the Year, had spit him out at 30.

He'd left a career .236 hitter, by the end bumming at-bats in Pittsburgh and Arizona. His body hurt, sure, but that was nothing compared to the hollowness in the place there had always been conviction. The next in a generation of shortstops grown big and strong who would cover ground and hold down the middle of a lineup, Crosby, instead, little by little, played himself gone.

The game can be relentless, especially so for a young man who wouldn't – couldn't – forget even

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Sergio Romo would push play, just to remind himself it really was him.

He'd push play and feel the night air in Detroit. Push play and shake Buster Posey into that fastball, the final pitch of 2012. Push play and see the mitt and feel the baseball come off his fingers, maybe just off center, so the fastball – at 89 mph all his frail body could generate – ran to the middle of the plate. And the faces. All those happy faces. 

Sergio Romo reacts after striking out Miguel Cabrera in the 10th inning of Game 4. (Getty)Then he'd look at his son, 6-year-old Rilen, and nod to the television, almost as if he needed confirmation.

"Who's that, mijo?"

"That's you, dad."

Five sliders he'd thrown to Miguel Cabrera, the best hitter in the game, using the grip his own father had taught him in college. The fastball – the grip, the will behind it, the choice to throw it then and there – was all his.

In the 10th inning of Game 4 of the World Series, Sergio Romo would trust the fighter in himself and the journey to that moment. He'd been a junior-college

Ryan Braun says his lawyers used Tony Bosch as a consultant during his PED appeal. (AP)

MARYVALE, Ariz. – Nobody surfs the eye of the storm quite like Ryan Braun.

Twenty-nine, an MVP, an MVP runner-up, a Rookie of the Year and still the lone drug-program appeal winner, Braun, in fact, has become the very symbol of the era. Not in his guilt or innocence, whatever that may be, but in the hazy grayness that has become his reputation and then the manner in which he must conduct himself.

Are you sure Braun is dirty? Are you sure he's not? Either way, what does that mean, and what does it say about the game, and how much does any of it matter anymore to the people who watch, root for and subsidize it?

The better-physiques-through-science hulks of the past generation are, for the most part, gone. The cheaters remain. They merely come in smaller packages, in subtle advantages measured in testosterone patches and throat lozenges designed to lift a man to the edge of illegal. To the edge of an advantage. The fight evolves. The circumstances go grayer. Players huddle

The Angels will have a loaded lineup with Josh Hamilton, Mike Trout and Albert Pujols. (AP)

TEMPE, Ariz. – There's this thing about spring training where, unless you've been anesthetized by Dr. Andrews in the past six months or struck out looking at a fastball to end the previous October, the past is generally ignored.

The past has its place, of course. It sends you to work in a 7-series BMW instead of a Kia rental. It puts you in a prime locker location when you get there. It registers as No. 32 on your back instead of 89.

Beyond that, the past can get you coming and going.

As Oscar Wilde once said, presumably after losing his arbitration hearing, "No man is rich enough to buy back his past."

And some old hardball poet answered, "My past is everything I failed to be."

So, really, there's not much sense going there. Not in February, not when a real at-bat is six weeks away, and certainly not if your team trains in, say, Mesa.

[Related: Who is Josh Hamilton thanking for his weight loss?]

The past guarantees nothing other than it is not today, unless it's

It was the summer of '94, another hot one in Birmingham, Ala., and rock stars flooded the city.

Pink Floyd played a concert at Legion Field Stadium. Three months later, the Rolling Stones played the same venue.

Seventeen miles south, in a summer-long engagement at Hoover Metropolitan Stadium, 31-year-old Michael Jordan played right field.

The local baseball team, the Southern League's Birmingham Barons, wasn't very good. Many of the Barons were young men who would fail to reach the big leagues or former big leaguers who never would return, so what a lot of minor league teams look like. Who is that gangly guy in the outfield? It's Michael Jordan, circa 1994. (Getty Images)

But, they had a nice bus. And they'd more than double the season attendance record at Hoover Met, which sat 11,000 and, turned out, stood several thousand more.

A former high school pitcher and NBA burnout, Jordan had traded his high-tops for a pair of spikes. Shaken by his father's murder and emotionally frail after three consecutive NBA titles, Jordan retired from basketball in the fall

GOODYEAR, Ariz. – Nick Swisher went into his locker and withdrew the evidence that something indeed had taken place here, already, hours into a camp that was to be notable for change if not necessarily improvement. Michael Bourn looks on after an at-bat. (AP)

The difference is wispy, like the vapor that puffed from their mouths here on a chilled Tuesday morning. Like the difference in feeling optimism rather than choosing it. Like their chances in the AL Central over the past five years.

The Cleveland Indians had pursued a perky little offseason. They'd hired a decorated manager whose book, "Francona: The Red Sox Years," is in Amazon's top 100. They'd splurged for the largest free-agent contract in club history, which, granted, hasn't distinguished itself in the way of large free-agent contracts. Then they'd gotten lucky, the way so many flyover organizations must, and that sent Swisher searching for a celebratory gesture.

"See, bro!?" he shouted, because he almost always shouts. "I've already got the first-baseman's