(USA TODAY Sports Images)

With the spring training exhibition schedule getting underway in earnest in Florida and Arizona on Tuesday, now seems as good a time as any to head this one off at the pass: The results mean nothing.

That’s not to say the games themselves are meaningless. They are used, along with other factors, to evaluate players competing for roster spots, so they’ve got implications for every big-league club. And they give teams plenty of opportunities to assess who’s running well and who’s throwing hard and everything else. That stuff matters.

But the spring training stats? Forget ’em. Last year, Mariners shortstop Brad Miller led all players with a 1.314 OPS in the spring. He went on to post a .653 OPS in the regular season. Justin Verlander threw 20 shutout innings in the Grapefruit League, then suffered through a miserable campaign. White Sox starter Jose Quintana allowed 20 earned runs in 11 innings — a 16.36 ERA — then produced a 3.32 mark in 32 regular-season starts.

And you can go on and on like that. There are plenty of examples of good spring training performances that came before good regular-season performances, but seemingly just as many bad springs before great seasons and vice versa.

Justin Verlander did not allow an earned run in 20 spring innings in 2014. (USA TODAY Sports Images)

The main thing is, it’s practice. Ballplayers are competitors, so they’re still trying. But the objective is to do the things necessary to help their teams win games from April through October, not in March. Players — especially veterans, and especially early in the spring schedule — use the games to hone the skills they’ll need later, and many take different approaches: A pitcher might throw his slider way more often than he will, a hitter might spit on fastballs early in counts to work on his two-strike hitting.

But beyond that, the level of competition varies greatly. And unless you’re really going to parse every spring training boxscore, it’s never going to be obvious which batters got their hits off big-league All-Stars and which guys fattened up on meatballs thrown by 19-year-olds without names on their jerseys who came over from the minor league camp to fill out a travel roster.

And then the Grapefruit and Cactus League schedules are only about 30 games long, and even the guys who play the most only amass 50 or 60 at-bats or 20 to 25 innings. Baseball stats are notoriously fickle across samples that small even when the games actually matter.

Again, there’s still plenty to watch in spring games. Major League Baseball players are incredibly good at baseball, and you’ll certainly see them show off some remarkable skills. And it’s the closest thing we get to real baseball until real baseball starts. Plus, it’s a nice opportunity to watch your team’s best prospects a year or two before they will graduate to the pros.

But don’t bother watching the scoreboard. It has no real bearing on what will happen when the games count.