{"id":19539,"date":"2017-02-06T00:01:03","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T00:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=19539"},"modified":"2017-02-05T12:40:26","modified_gmt":"2017-02-05T12:40:26","slug":"counting-down-the-days-to-spring-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=19539","title":{"rendered":"Counting down the days to Spring Training"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are now less than three weeks away from the MLB Spring Training games beginning.<\/p>\n

Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Detroit, NY Mets, NY Yankees, Philadelphia and San Francisco all play their first full Spring Training game (i.e. against another MLB team rather than a university side) on Friday 24 Februaury, with the rest of the teams getting going the following day.<\/p>\n

It tends to be that the start and end of pre-season are when the games are worth a look.<\/p>\n

The start of spring merits attention because even a casual pre-season friendly (in British sporting parlance) scratches the baseball itch after nearly four months without any MLB games.<\/p>\n

The end of Spring Training offers games between close to full strength teams, wrapped up in the anticipation of the ‘real’ action being about to begin.<\/p>\n

The two or three weeks of games between those two points usually are less than enticing; however this year we have the excitement of the World Baseball Classic to more than cover the gap.<\/p>\n

It won’t be long before stateside baseball is here again and in the meantime the Australian League Championship Series takes place between 8-12 February and can be seen online<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are now less than three weeks away from the MLB Spring Training games beginning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[565,553,373],"class_list":["post-19539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-australia","tag-mlb-2","tag-spring-training"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19539"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19541,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19539\/revisions\/19541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}