Anxious.

There are times when the crush of story ideas debilitates me into total brainlock.

Then there are times when it feels like there’s just not a lot out there to comment on, and over the years I’ve tried to take that cue and not force empty words and kilobytes on you, which in five minutes you might suggest I occasionally fail to do.

But sometimes a story idea creeps out from a place you don’t expect, and while this really isn’t a story at all — and probably shouldn’t have brought me to the keyboard this morning — here I am and here it goes.

Yesterday I was reading a Richard Justice column on MLB.com about the James Shields market and locked in on a Rangers mention:

“At this late date, several teams that might have had previous interest in Shields — the Tigers, Red Sox, Rangers — have filled out their rotation and are anxious to get to Spring Training and begin assessing their club.”

Lately I’ve considered sitting down to write about the camp competition set up between Michael Choice, Kyle Blanks, and Ryan Ludwick; about the subject of Johan Santana and Phil Coke and Joe Thatcher . . . and Martire Garcia; about the Hamiltons and shoulder surgery and reality TV; and about a really good column not about Tyler Seguin, but by him.

I’ve thought about spotlighting Keith Law’s Top 100 Prospects rollout, which contains six Rangers (four in the top 52) and includes three pitchers: Jake Thompson, Chi Chi Gonzalez (whom Law says “is probably the fourth- or fifth-best starting pitcher in the organization, period”), and Luis Ortiz (which is interesting, even if you don’t recognize that Cubs righthander C.J. Edwards, the key regret piece in the Rangers’ 2013 trade for Matt Garza, is nowhere on Law’s Top 100).

Law also said this week on a Chicago radio station: “I could watch [Joey] Gallo take BP all day long. It’s freakish. I mean there’s 80 power, and there’s Gallo. Gallo is [Giancarlo] Stanton-type power — the other players stop what they’re doing [to watch].”

I almost wrote a story about that.

I’ve resisted bullet-pointing a hundred things Jeff Banister said at the January 25 Coaches’ Clinic, but man, I won’t be able to resist forever, at least on some of what Banister shared for an awesome hour-plus.

Allen Simpson (Perfect Game USA) wrote a Sporting News column this week in which he tabbed the Texas farm system as baseball’s second best (behind the Cubs), probably an overly aggressive ranking but a note that I might nonetheless have tucked toward the end of a COFFEY report, after notes about Boston’s refusal to put catcher Blake Swihart into a Cole Hamels deal (and why that’s relevant) and about the Red Sox now employing three of the busiest six relievers from the Rangers’ 2012 bullpen with the addition of both Robbie Ross Jr. and Alexi Ogando, and before mention of new homes for Neal Cotts, Scott Baker, Ben Rowen, Taylor Teagarden, Joey Butler, Nick Masset, Josh Wilson, Wilfredo Boscan, Joe Benson, Eli Whiteside, and Charlie Leesman, new limbo for Gonzalez Germen, and three new roving minor league instructors hired by the Rangers, including the only “Dwayne” in baseball history to have played in the big leagues without having a run in the Rangers organization.

I considered building a report around Thad Levine’s segment on the Ben and Skin Show yesterday, focused not on his use of the term “fluid organism” but instead on the things he said about the huge impact the club is already getting from Michael Young, who has been “working out a ton with our younger players, . . . educating [them on] how the game is supposed to be played, the way that he played it, the way the Texas Rangers played it when we went to two World Series.” Levine talked about the benefits of “wear testing” how the front office communicates with players by bouncing ideas first off Young and Darren Oliver and letting them help streamline the message and the delivery. Levine suggested that Young has limitless possibilities in the game, whether it’s in a front office capacity or in coaching, and that the “second half of his career has a chance to be as good, if not better, than his playing career.”

I thought about writing about Kyler Murray and Russell Wilson, and an analytic model this week that compared Rougned Odor to Robinson Cano.

But in every one of those cases, I decided, right or wrong, that it just wasn’t worth overblogging on.

Then I read that Justice piece on Shields yesterday, zeroed in on the sentence that drew the subject of the Texas Rangers peripherally into the story, and dismissed the idea of Shields (and of writing at length about him) just as Justice did himself.

The rest of that sentence is what got my baseball adrenaline going.

“ . . . anxious to get to Spring Training and begin assessing their club.”

Man.

There’s not really a story to write about those 11 words. But they struck a nerve, because I know that’s exactly how many of us feel.

Between now and Surprise, I’d expect there to be a nameplate printed up for another left-handed reliever, or maybe another bat brought in to compete for work, and I suppose there’s a chance something happens over the next two weeks that prompts me to write something with actual substance. But if not, that’s OK. Because it’s just about that time. Time to get there, and begin assessing.

It’s just about that time.