Rory Parks | The Long−Suffering Sports Fan

The Toronto Maple Leafs are on a nice hot streak lately, going 6-2-2 over their past 10 games.

And now that I've made a comment about hockey, I've officially talked about all four major sports over the course of the past couple of months. So … there's that.

First of all, I sort of want to apologize for last week's column. I had written it and sent it in to the editors before I heard about the coven of sin that Tiger Woods has apparently been operating out of southern Florida.

While I still think that we should leave Tiger and his family to tend to their own business, I would like to retract my out-and-out defense of him. I regret this error.

And now moving on to something that has not been beaten into the ground just yet: Major League Baseball's winter meetings. It's sort of like Christmas before Christmas (or, if you're Theo Epstein, maybe it's a little different).

Even as an Orioles fan who sees each hotel that the winter meetings have been held in as a white-collar frat house — a place where unthinkable and immoral decisions are made — I can't help but be at least a little excited.

There's not even that much going on this year. Chone Figgins can now baffle the good people of Seattle, who will lovingly mispronounce his name for the first two months of the season, Matt Holliday might end up as a Met, and Roy Halladay might end up in Toronto because somehow the springtime weather in Arizona is unbearable when compared to that of Florida. Otherwise, there's not much happening.

But that doesn't stop the hoopla, the fuss and the giddy excitement a baseball fan feels when he clicks on the Web site for his hometown newspaper or mlbtraderumors.com to see if maybe, just maybe, his team has made all his dreams come true and signed Mark Teixeira (wait, I mean screw Mark Teixeira, I never wanted that bum anyway).

The three days of winter meetings really do sort of feel like Christmas mornings as a child, when anything can happen, and magic floats through the sky with the snow.

And I guess it makes some sense. After all, people like change. That's why things like mid-life crises exist. I frankly can't imagine what the winter months were like before the free-agency era. They must have been indescribably dull.

I actually picture something like a "Little House on the Prairie" setting, with baseball fans huddled around a fire talking about the same old players that they've talked about for the past 15 years and wondering if anything's ever going to change.

But when I try to explain to my non-believing friends and family members why the Hot Stove season is so important to me, the only thing I can come up with is that I love baseball. You'd think 12 years of agony would have beaten that out of me, but it hasn't.

In fact, to be even a little more cliché, I love all sports (even hockey, so long as the Capitals are winning). That's why writing a weekly sports column has been one of the best experiences of my Tufts career, and that's why I can't see myself in a job that doesn't involve sports in some way.

Even if you don't feel the same way I do though, I want to thank you for reading and for putting up with my potshots at Tom Brady, Dustin Pedroia and the rest of the New England sports family. Hopefully, I'll be back next semester.

Until then, happy free agency to all, and to all a burning Hot Stove.

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Rory Parks is a senior majoring in international relations and Spanish. He can be reached at Rory.Parks@tufts.edu.