My wife tells me it must be a guy thing.

She’s right.

It is a guy thing.

It’s something guys get and girls don’t.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. It might even be a sad thing that it’s a guy thing.

I know women who love baseball. They can tell you what a 6-4-3 means, explain the infield fly rule and can argue the merits of the designated hitter (for the record, there are no merits and it should be abolished). But they could care less that this is the week pitchers and catchers report.

Guys do care.

Maybe it affirms that we’ve almost made it through another winter. That we won’t have to fiddle with the radio dial on the drive home, searching for a sound to break up the music and the talk. You can always find a game.

Maybe it’s because we never grew up.

I’m not suggesting it makes sense that grown men anxiously wait for other grown men to try to succeed in playing a child’s game. Or that it’s logical for us to get goosebumps knowing pimple-faced millionaires are in a warm place spitting tobacco juice and adjusting their cups.

But we do.

And right about now I’m ready to put an end to this winter’s hot stove league.

Hot stove?

It’s an ancient male-bonding ritual.

Guys in winter gather around the old kitchen stove with our shirts off, eating spicy foods and drinking cold beverages, wearing face paint of our team colors, chanting our team songs and talking up baseball.

“Meet the Mets ... meet the Mets ... step right up and greet the Mets ...”

Then we go around the room, asking each other pertinent questions of the day:

“We traded him for whom?” “We wasted our money on him?” “Do we have enough hitting?” “Do we have enough pitching?” (For the record you never can have enough pitching.)

It helps get our minds off the daily drudgeries of life as we cling to the possibility that we’ll witness winning baseball when the summer sun gives way to crisp autumn nights. In reality our jubilation turns with the colors on the leaves.

We haven’t even finished the last chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” when we start itch’n for the first pitch.

You don’t itch for basketball in July.

Football fills our weekends – only when the game counts.

But baseball…they won’t play it for real for another six weeks, and still we’ve got it in our blood. It never leaves us.

This week we end the hot stove talk.

This week, pitchers and catchers report.

My wife tells me I’m a glutton for punishment. I tell her this is the Mets’ year.

She tells me she heard that last year.

Last year? Ah, such promise. Such hope. Such heartache. I like to call it the $350 million nightmare. That’s how much we spent to go from 100 wins the year before to have our season end by Memorial Day.

She wonders how I can get excited about a team that always breaks my heart.

How else can you be a Mets fan? Heartbreak is our middle name.

Even with another month of biting cold, shoveling snow and scraping ice, the warmth of summer has already arrived.

The old hurlers are gone and unfortunately so is Buck. So, new manager, a couple of young prospects and we have Diaz back to close. Alonso, Lindor and McNeil are as good as they get and Nimmo and Marte should have breakout years. 

Only, today isn’t about wins and losses.

It’s knowing hitters will soon follow the pitchers and catchers. It’s box scores. It’s Keith kidding Ron and Gary telling us “It’s Outta Here!”

Then it’s opening day.

“Meet the Mets ... meet the Mets ...”

Yeah, it’s a guy thing.

Barry Lewis is a longtime journalist and author who lives with his wife Bonnie in the Town of Neversink. He can be reached at      barrylewisscdemocrat@gmail.com.