Baseball fans love the winding down of March Madness for it signals something entirely different: that first pitch of early April. But before opening day (April 2!), what’s a self-respecting baseball lover to do? Run out and scan the newsstands for annual season previews that are sprouting like a field of crocuses.

We took a look at two of the best — Lindy’s and The Sporting News. While both do a good enough job, die-hard baseball fans would be better served reaching for The Sporting News.

TSN Editor Scott Smith squeezes more into 196 pages than we thought possible. Of course it contains more stats than the Census Bureau, breaking down 2016 every which way — but the issue also does it better than everyone else.

Right up front it shows where active players stand in all-time career stats. Its graphics are better than those presented by Lindy’s — like its five-year win trend.

Plus, TSN offers up a clear pick for which team will win it all — the Cubs!, again. One gripe: If you’re going to run lineups on images of a team’s home field, why not use the real field? This isn’t football or hockey. Fenway Park’s field isn’t the same as Yankee Stadium’s field — so why are your diagrams the same?

TSN also delivers with a new stat it claims is a better indicator of talent: BPO, or bases per out. The statistic is derived from taking the total number of bases a batter reaches divided by the number of outs he makes.

Very interesting.

Lindy’s comes up a bit short in a few categories. For starters, senior editor Shane O’Neill decided to lead off his 200-page issue with a boring story on MLB’s collective bargaining agreement. Then he tells us Mike Trout is unlikely to be traded (as if!) and then reports on the game’s most overpaid players — and at least three aren’t even on 2017 rosters.

The issue also doesn’t have guts. It predicts league champions but doesn’t come out and shout who it thinks will win the World Series.

We know it won’t be the Cubs because Lindy’s picks the Nationals to play in the Fall Classic against the Indians.

The top news weeklies are wrestling with death in various forms, with Time asking on its cover, “Is Truth Dead?”

Author Michael Scherer doesn’t leave us with an answer in the emerging Trump era of fake news and alternative facts.

A more pointed question would be: “Does Truth Matter?” Scherer veers to the comical in noting President Trump’s tweet: “Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden.”

Yet a riot outside Stockholm days later had Trump claiming to be a truth-teller rather than a soothsayer. “I was right about that,” he said.

The president tried hiding behind another “truth” after saying Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s dad consorted with John F. Kennedy’s assassin.

“Why do you say that I have to apologize?” he said of the falsehood he’d read in the National Enquirer. “I am just quoting the newspaper.”

Tad Friend literally takes on death in the New Yorker — a subject, he reports, that serial-disrupter Silicon Valley is now seeking to disrupt.

Some of the 12-page round-up is scary, such as “a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks become younger.”

And some is Greek tragedy: “Tithonus, whose lover, Eos, begged Zeus to grant him eternal life but forgot to request eternal youth as well. Decrepit, senile, and miserable, Tithonus eventually shrank into a cicada.”

As for the numbers: The New Yorker tells us that death, which claims 150,000 people a day worldwide, will come mostly through accident and violence up to age 44, then mostly from cancer to age 65, and mostly from heart disease past then.