If Day 1 is about handshakes and fresh spikes in the clubhouse, Day 2 is where the tone starts to reveal itself. And the tone on this morning was set in the dugout. Steve Cohen met the media for 22 minutes, and if there was one word he kept circling back to, it was “excited.” But don’t confuse that with satisfied. “I feel like there’s a different energy here this year than last year,” Cohen said. “I don’t know what it is. It just feels really optimistic.” That optimism lives

There are certain sites and sounds in spring training that signal baseball is officially alive again, the pop of a fastball in a catcher’s mitt, the sound of a fungo bat, and the unmistakable cadence of a manager standing at a podium explaining, in calm baseball speak, why everything is both encouraging and cautiously monitored. On Friday, Carlos Mendoza stepped into that role, delivering a wide-ranging briefing that touched on pitching health, roster development, defensive p