By Jamie Rieger

Before the first robin arrives and the snow melts, there is another spring phenomena taking place south of the border that is a sure sign that summer is right around the corner...Major League Baseball spring training. Spring training is necessary for the players to knock the dust off their cleats and the kinks out of their bodies and get ready to battle for more than 160 games of regular season play.
After months of counting down the days to Truck Day (the day the equipment gets moved south to Florida) and spring training, this baseball fan can finally settle in and watch her favourite team, the Boston Red Sox, duke it out in the American League East division. For a few hours in the evening, work can be put aside, the doom and gloom on the news channels shut off, and I can sit and watch my favourite pastime.
With not many Red Sox games being shown on channels in western Canada, I have resorted to the next best thing..MLB.TV, which allows me to watch as many games as possible for a small monthly fee. In fact, I can watch four games at a time, if I so choose. So far, I have not done that, except to check scores in other hot games, mainly to see how the Muppets from New York are doing. For anybody who does not know, the muppets would be the New York Yankees.
And, while I am watching the game on the computer, I can be keeping up with the game with other Red Sox fanatics on a number of social networking groups. The rants and raves are always similar amongst the posters on these sites. "When is Big Papi going to hit that long ball?", "What the heck is Tito (coach, Terry Francona) thinking?" and all sorts of comments that can not be printed here about the opponent we are facing, most recently, the Tampa Bay Rays, who have been clobbering the Sox.
Frustrations at the team, the opponent, cheers when the Sox perform at the plate and jeers at Yankee fans who trickle into the website to get their two cents in are all part of the fun and makes watching the game more entertaining than laying on the couch watching the game solo.
Right now, my beloved Sox are not performing as well as I would like and a couple players are still getting a few kinks knocked out of their systems. Dice-K, that would be you!
But, the season is young and there is plenty of time for the Sox to get to the top of the leaderboard. If there is one thing any red Sox fan can tell you, it is you gotta keep the faith!