Are you ready for some baseball? Me neither.

With March Madness heading into the Sweet 16 and the NBA regular season ending soon, who has had time to notice baseball?

The fact that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series last fall and start this season with two games in Japan vs. the A's (tomorrow morning at 6 a.m.) makes it feel like the off-season flew by.

Don't get me wrong, I love baseball. It's just that it doesn't feel like baseball time on March 25. I think baseball really arrives when the weather in the barren Northeast cracks 60 degrees regularly and every other sport has wound down.

Nothing says summer like watching a baseball game on TV with your favorite beverage. Or even better, attending said game in shorts and a t-shirt (what a concept). Although, the first month of the baseball season is truly the only time you care about your fantasy team until you quickly realize they're hopeless.
I'm not going to do a straight team preview-mostly because I'm sick and my mind is too clouded to think of anything half-original.

I will say that I think baseball is the hardest professional sport (currently) to repeat as champions. Sure, the NFL-the model of parity-can make that claim too but no season is as chock full of unexpected injuries, slumps and breakout seasons as baseball. We can agree a 162-game regular season is crazy, right?

With all that said, the Sox enter this season with probably the best chance in my lifetime to repeat. They brought back nearly every influential piece of last season's team while addressing minor needs (getting rid of Mirabelli and picking up Sean Casey).

It seems to have the perfect blend of youth (Dustin Pedroia, Jonathan Papelbon, Jacoby Ellsbury, Clay Bucholz), superstars (David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Josh Beckett) and veterans (Mike Lowell, Tim Wakefield, Jason Varitek).

Sure expectations are at a nearly unreachable level (World Series or bust!) but how many times do you go into a season this loaded with so few questions. The Boston Red Sox enter the 2008 season as the team to beat in MLB. It's all come full circle.

With cold medicine hopefully in full effect, I probably won't make the 6:07 a.m. first pitch tomorrow morning with Dice-K on the mound but when the Sox come back to the States on April 1st (for the A's home-opener), give me a call.