This story was excerpted from Keegan Matheson's Blue Jays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

At its best, Spring Training can be the greatest teaser trailer in sports.

No, not for the movie Vladimir Guerrero Jr. pitched last spring, which was met with mixed reviews by critics and featured a sudden, jarring end. More on Vladdy in a moment, though.

Instead, spring is where hope lives. Baseball is the true prospect sport, where an organization’s next superstar often exists on the horizon for years before debuting on the big stage. That’s not something we see in the NFL, NBA or NHL, making Spring Training a unique glimpse into the future.

It’s also built into our body clock at this point, an unofficial signaling of the coming end of winter. No batters have struck out yet. No pitchers have been taken deep. No managers have botched a bullpen move. I haven’t even written my first poor story of the season yet. All of our stat lines are, mercifully, reset to zero.

Working in baseball, this also brings the end of a hibernation. I’m always reminded of Spring Training 2018, when I arrived in camp after making the 24-hour drive from Toronto to Dunedin, Fla., and was greeted in the first scrum of the day by John Gibbons looking me up and down with a wry smile.

“Look at you, Keegs. Did they just dig you up, or what?”

Another memorable greeting came from a Blue Jays catcher a year later, early one morning at what was then still called Dunedin Stadium (now TD Ballpark). I’m a big man who grew up with Nova Scotia’s sea breeze, so the heat and humidity bother me. Ask another Blue Jays beat writer next time you see them, as they’re all treated to my daily complaints. As I entered the clubhouse that morning around 8:15 a.m., already terribly humid, this player let me know he had a question for me.

“How long did it take you to swim here this morning?” he asked.

The lasting Spring Training memory from my early years covering this organization, though -- and this will be year seven for me -- came in a parking lot.

This was 2018 or ’19, just as Guerrero was going from a top prospect to a household name in baseball circles, the prodigy sent to save the franchise.

I pulled into the parking lot of the old complex that morning, parking among the players’ vehicles as my beat-up Honda stuck out among the rows of signing bonus specials. As I turned my key and parked the car, though, a ball landed nearby and rolled into the wheels of a pickup truck. This parking lot was comfortably beyond the right-field fence of the nearest field, a back field that was typically used for fielding drills or live BP. 

As I stepped out of my car, there came another ball. This one cleared the wall, bounced, whizzed by my legs and thumped off the front bumper of my car, lowering its value another five dollars. 

When I walked around the corner of the fence, I expected to see a round of live batting practice, or perhaps just some traditional BP with a player on a hot streak. Maybe it was a lefty bat yanking some home runs over the fence before lunch. 

Instead, I saw Guerrero Jr. He was standing at home plate, by himself, tossing balls up into the air like a child in the backyard, then crushing them over the opposite-field fence. His only other audience was a handful of five or six teammates huddled nearby. 

Those are the moments that make Spring Training special, those small glimpses into a career or a team that’s yet to come. Plenty more will play out on the broadcasts you can watch from home, and we’ll have expansive coverage of what happens each day in camp, but across the six weeks of Spring Training, there’s always a hidden gem. 

And this spring, at the club’s shiny new complex, I’ll park more sensibly.