Results tagged ‘ Dodgers ’
Two weeks in a day
What we learned last week:
Baseball is back, and nothing stops it from coming back, time after time, thing after thing, distraction after distraction. Baseball — the game, the event, the pulse — never, ever stops. It just goes ’round and ’round and ’round.
When pitchers and catchers reported this week, quite a few veterans needed directions to the complex and had a whole new set of threads.
There were about 37 seconds where everybody could safely say they believed every single word coming out of Alex Rodriguez’s mouth — and there are some who didn’t believe those 37 seconds, either.
There are many creative variations to the nickname A-Rod.
Yuri Sucart is not a KGB agent or the villain in “The Usual Suspects.” Angel Presinal is not actually the name of a performance-enhancing drug. “He took some Presinal and his numbers went all wacky.”
You can go home again. And home can actually be the Emerald City, if you’re named Junior and not Dorothy.
Manny Being Manny can be entertaining when he’s not even on a roster.
What we’ll learn this week:
What Dodger Blue looks like in the Arizona sun. And by Sunday, what Glendale’s new ballpark will look like with that hue and some black-and-white Sox.
Flip side, of course, is for the first time in more than a half-century we’ll find out what Dodgertown in Vero Beach looks like dark, with no games going on all spring. Thanks for the memories, Vero.
We’ll also see how the Tribe’s new Goodyear digs play this week. It’s a long way from Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, where they last roosted in Arizona back in the ’90s before the roundtrip to FLA.
What CC Sabathia looks like pitching for the Yankees. (And fill in the two blanks from there, on down the line.)
Exactly who will play for whom in the World Baseball Classic, and we’ll all officially begin to wonder — can it possibly top 2006?
Possibly, just possibly, Mannywood will made its 2009 debut in Glendale.
Yakyu Haiku
That’s the American tradition of baseball in Japanese, and here’s an Americanized version of a Japanese tradition:
Bring the world to ball
for a springtime gathering –
once every three years
MLBlog Shoutout
Our good pal and MLB-dot cohort Tom Singer recently did an interesting study of arb vs. FA, one that actually makes sense to the mathematically impaired. Eh, not that anyone at The Grind has that problem, of course.
Waiting for that Mannywood ending…
The Dodgers signed a Gold Glove winner on Friday, and it wasn’t Manny Ramirez.
OK, OK. So Manny wouldn’t even qualify for a Bronze Glove if they had one, and the real Gold Glove winner is actually a second baseman. In fact, the Dodgers did quite well for themselves picking up Orlando Hudson for a one-year deal relatively light on guaranteed money but rife with incentives.
But you hear “Dodgers” and “sign” these days and you’re waiting for “Manny.” True, even with a signing that brings the Dodgers arguably their best double-play combination since The Infield, as long as the injury bug doesn’t resurface for both.
Each day begs the question: Where’s Manny? And the followup: Do they have cartoons there?
The report that he was hanging out watching cartoons and working out this winter was so Manny, and in case you haven’t noticed — so L.A. That’s practically a resume item in that town. He’s commuting in Florida, reportely spending the weekdays in Pensacola and the weekends home in Miami, working out daily. No word on cartoons.
And no word on a deal. Yet.
But what’s happening in the meantime is the Dodgers are slowly preparing to be strong in the suspect NL West — especially if Manny puts on the blue bandana before April. They don’t have pitching to carry them, but the lineup is better than it was a year ago. While Hudson is a completely different player and a wildly different clubhouse presence, he certainly makes up for Jeff Kent’s retirement.
Until the other shoe drops on the Manny thing or he decides he’d like to take on left field at AT&T Park to remind him of those chilly, quirky Fenway days, we’ll just have to keep checking the Cartoon Network for updates.
Yakyu Haiku
That’s the American tradition of baseball in Japanese, and here’s an Americanized version of a Japanese tradition:
Cartoons and workouts,
will a spring sign end winter?
Manny, go to camp
Bottom line
The A’s won’t be moving to Fremont after all. About the only good thing that pops to mind on that is it saves us from the Fremont A’s — or Oakland A’s of Fremont, whatever.
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