Courtesy New York Newsday

(February 27, 2009) Ron Darling was back on your television yesterday, a harbinger of spring, and the last place he expected to be when he looked into his future in 1982.

At the time, he was a 21-year-old pitcher for Triple-A Tidewater who had dabbled in radio analysis when Newsday's Pat Calabria asked him if he might pursue broadcasting post-baseball.

"Maybe when I'm 70," he said. "I like to think I'll have more useful things to do from the time I'm 40 until I'm 70."

Oops. Darling, now 48, laughed at those ancient words before the Mets met the Marlins on SNY.

"That was the talking of a hubristic young man who thought he'd win 250 big-league games and sit on his laurels and do autograph signings," he said.

Darling settled for 136 victories and now is a rising media star. He sounded quite content to be spending his late-February day in a way his younger self would have considered less than useful.

"I took a walk with my dogs after a winter in New York watching them shiver," he said from his spring training residence within walking distance of Tradition Field.

"They are in heaven. It just inspired me to be happy I'm here."

So does having his parents spend spring training with him, and coming home from games to his father barbecuing and his mother having done his laundry. "It's like being 10 years old," he said.

So does what he saw on his dog walk: a half-dozen pairs of people playing catch "with the anticipation of going to the game. I tend to forget how important these kinds of rituals are to folks."

All of which is a very long way of illustrating the obvious:

On the first day SNY and YES televised live baseball since September, those of us in colder climes with still-shivering dogs took a giant step closer to spring.

Fact is, exhibition games always sound better in theory than in fact. Only the most passionate fans can make it through nine innings of this stuff.

But that's not the point. It's just nice to know it's there, soothing background noise and pictures starring palm trees as much as baseball players.

If you buy that theory, the good news is there will be more baseball on TV this March than ever before, from the slates on SNY and YES (12 games apiece) and Ch. 11 (four Mets games) to spring games on the MLB Network to the second World Baseball Classic.

The MLB Network will offer 61 simulcasts of locally produced exhibition games (45 live), including a World Series rematch tomorrow with the Rays and Phillies.

Games that are on SNY or YES - not including the Yankees vs. Team USA on Tuesday - will be blacked out on the MLB Network in the New York area. But MLB Net will carry one Mets game and two Yankees games not on SNY or YES by simulcasting the opposing team's broadcast.

Also, the WBC is back after a three-year hiatus, with 23 games on ESPN or ESPN2 beginning Thursday and ending March 23 with the final in Los Angeles.

The MLB Network will have 16 WBC games starting March 8. MLB will use both its own announcers and those from the international feed, including Jim Kaat for two games from Puerto Rico.

ESPN is rolling out 39 original "Baseball Tonight" shows in March as it keeps a close, wary eye on its MLB-owned counterpart, which offers regular studio shows of its own.

It should be enough to whet any appetite for live, pre-Opening Day baseball.

That includes Darling, who was asked again about that long-ago quote.

"I said, 'Hopefully, I have something better to do,"' he said. "I didn't."