You smell that? No, seriously, do you smell that? It’s the smell of spring. It’s the smell of rain and flowers and birds crapping on your car (well, my car). But most importantly, it’s the smell of pretzels and peanuts and Cracker Jacks.

It’s the smell of baseball.

Kevin Kaduk of Yahoo’s Big League Stew joins the show to preview the 2011 season. Opening Day — which is suddenly on Thursday and Friday — is a time when every city still has a chance to win it all. It’s a time when Jeff Franceour has finally put it all together. It’s a time where every stadium is sold out (until game two, in some towns).

We talk a lot about the job of a baseball beat writer, perhaps the most difficult job in all of sports media. We laud the work of people like Bob Dutton and Todd Zolecki and Kaduk admits that he’d rather sell insurance than cover a beat…it’s that much of a grind.

As most shows with Kaduk go, we talk about a lot of stuff, including how underrated Passover is as a food holiday. Yes, matzos can be better than you think and no, I have no clue what that has to do with baseball. We try to preview the season by talking about who we think will win each pennant but end up talking more about how everything gets thrown out the window when injuries happen. Heck, I said I think all the injuries for the Phillies may knock them down from a 105 win team to a 97 win team…three hours before news broke that Brad Lidge may miss half the season. Could the Phillies end up like the Mets a few years ago? It wasn’t so long ago that the Mets were a real contender that got hammered by injuries. Should we be worried?

I bought a pack of 2011 Topps cards and opened them during the show, saying that I’d try to start a fantasy team with whoever I got. Ty Wigginton on the Orioles, with an Orioles logo on the card? Gil Meche? Half the pack is now on Colorado? Dennis Eckersley from 1987? What kind of fantasy team is that?

We touch on some other BLS stories, including David Eckstein donating a kidney once he officially retires. We also talk about , leading BLS’s Dave Brown to go off on a bit of a rant about the social responsibility of owning a weapon, which inevitably led to the Yahoo commenters turning the story into one about the right to bear arms.

Oh, right, the .

Oh, . You hear that accent? The only reason a guy with that accent ends up working at a Home Depot in Washington State is because his other alternative was sleeping with fishes. Did Big League Stew just out a guy in the witness protection program because he’s a big Mets fan? We’ll never know…

Ah, baseball.