I ask Joe if the college kids get excited about these games with the pros (I’m thinking of the BC pitcher who struck out big David Ortiz in the third, and wondering if he’ll still be telling people about it when he’s forty-five and paunchy). “Oh, like you wouldn’t believe,” Joe says, and then goes on to tell us the Red Sox player the college kids liked the most was the much maligned Carl Everett, who was dubbed Jurassic Carl by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy (for his temper as much as his fundamentalist Christian beliefs), and who has since been traded to the Montreal Expos. “He was great to the [college players],” Joe says. “He’d spend lots of time talking to them and give them all kinds of equipment.” He pauses, then adds, “I bet he prospers in Montreal, because there’s no media coverage. People won’t be watching him so closely.”

By now it’s the bottom of the sixth, and Joe excuses himself. He and his broadcast partner, Jerry Trupiano (“Troop”), are doing the evening game (another slo-mo scrimmage, this time against Northeastern, with a fellow named Schilling starting for the Sox), and he has to prepare. But, like everything else that happens this day, the preparations will be leisurely, more pleasure than business. Joe knows a lot of people back home in New England will be listening, but not exactly paying attention—it’s the Soxversus Northeastern, after all…but it’s also baseball, Schilling on the mound, Garciaparra at short, and Varitek behind the plate (at least for a while, then maybe Kelly Shoppach, another guy with a high number). It’s the fact of it that matters, like that first robin you see on your still-snowy front lawn.

It’s too early to play really hard, and too early to wax really lyrical, either (God knows there’s too much labored lyricism in baseball writing these days; it’s even crept into the newspapers, which used to be bastions of statistics and hard-nosed reality—what sports reporters used to call “the agate”).