My favorite newcomer so far has to be Junior Spivey. He's always been a solid player, and he's the most conspicuous team member in his calf-high striped socks, always a plus. We'll see if he can live up to Edgar Renteria's old #3. Speaking of uniforms, when I arrived at the stadium in Ft. Lauderdale I was pleasantly surprised to see the Cards wearing their red caps with their grey road uniforms. For the past 15 or so years, they've been wearing navy blue caps with their road uniforms. I think the red caps with the grey jerseys is the best look in baseball--I hope they keep it during the regular season.
The Cardinals lost Monday's game to the Orioles 11-8 in a game that featured 32 hits. The pitching looked pretty suspect, but I guess they get a little bit of a break for pitching to actual major leaguers. Sandwiched between games featuring the no-name Marlins and the Dodgers' soon-to-be AA players, the Orioles ran out Corey Patterson, Melvin Mora, Kevin Millar, Jeff Conine, Jay Gibbons, and Desi Relaford.
Tuesday's game was back at home (Jupiter, FL), and I arrived at the spring training complex just in time to see Chris Carpenter finishing one of his drills and signing some autographs along the chain link fence. But he didn't just sign some autographs; he signed all of them. For 10-15 minutes, Mr. Cy Young 2005 signed balls, signed pictures, and posed for photos until everyone who wanted his time got it, which I had never seen before.
The Cardinals played the Dodgers on Tuesday. The Bums are one of the few National League teams I've never seen play, so I was very excited. The Cards and Dodgers have always been the two most storied NL teams, which is kind of cool. And they've got a bunch of names in their lineup, among them Rafael Furcal, Nomar Garciaparra, Cesar Izturis, Jeff Kent, Bill Mueller, J.D. Drew, and Kenny Lofton. But the lineup I got to see featured Repko, Aybar, Ethier, Guzman, Loney, Martin, Martinez, Abreu, and Andy LaRoche, who between them have two years of major league experience.
Webster's defines "masochism" as "trying to keep score at a spring training game". It took me until the fifth inning of my third spring training game, but I learned that keeping score during spring training is a pretty dumb undertaking. First off, they make all kinds of substitutions without notifying you, and, as was the case today, the players don't have names on their jerseys. Also, there isn't a good scoreboard that shows the lineup, which is important because multiple switches are often made, so you need to know who bats where. Not that it matters. Spring training is where the guy sitting next to you has been a fan for fifty years and the usher has seen more baseball in the month of March than you've seen in your whole life, so you're better off talking baseball than trying to record it.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Sunday, March 5, 2006
Spring Training Day 1
There's something uniquely American about going to spring training, and there's also something very American about listening to a Bob Dylan album while driving down the interstate, though I'm not sure how well the two go together. The Dylan record, which I bought this morning, is a symptom of the unfortunate fact that my rental car doesn't have a tape deck to play my iPod, so I had to find something to save me from eastern Florida radio.
Lined with palm trees and orange groves, the drive down Florida's coast down I-95 is really beautiful, with a couple notable exceptions. The last time I was in Florida was for a waste-to-energy project with Dow. I learned that because Florida has a high water table, there are very few places they can put landfills, so the landfills they do have are extremely large. In fact, in some counties the highest elevation is actually a hill filled with garbage. Along my drive today there were only two hills of any size, and wouldn't you know it, both of them were landfills.
I arrived in Jupiter at about 10:30 after leaving Orlando at 8:00. When I made it to the practice fields there were some guys taking batting practice to my right. I was a couple hundred feet from the batter when I heard a ball being hit. When I looked up, it was coming straight for me. I reached up to grab it, and the ball bounded off my fingers and was retrived by a guy behind me. I should have known this already, but I had it reinforced in a pretty painful way: it's tough to catch a well-struck ball barehanded.
At the beginning of last year I got a little tired of hearing how all the Cardinals fans were going to fall in love with David Eckstein. He was described as the kind of guy who brings his lunchpail to the ballpark--he runs to first base on a base on balls, always hustles on every play, and works hard enough to overcome his lack of size. But I've discovered that he's more than just Pete Rose with an adequate haircut. He's a really nice and funny guy, as he continues to demonstrate. Last year at pregame warmups in Houston he enjoyed leaning into the first two rows of fans to catch balls being thrown by his partne, and today he stopped to pose for a few pictures, joking with the woman who was snapping them. Plus, he signs more autographs than just about anybody I've ever seen.
The thing that really cracks me up about spring training is how chummy the players and fans are. After Scott Rolen finished batting practice, an older woman complimented him on his hitting and asked him if he was healthy. He smiled and said, "Healthy enough." Later the same woman had a long conversation about an upcoming cruise that some of the Cardinals participate in.
The game was pretty decent. The Cards beat the Marlins, 6-3, in a pretty sloppy game that featured six errors. By far the most interesting game was had by Travis Hanson. He came in to play third base in the sixth inning and immediately got to work, collecting two quick errors. He had another error in the seventh. Then he hit a homer on the only pitch he saw and had a very nice defensive play in the ninth. For those of you scoring at home, he had a fielding average of .500 (three errors in six chances) and a slugging average of 4.000. Wow.
The Marlins had a fire sale in the offseason. Again. Here's the surnames that made up their starting lineup today: Andino, Uggla, Jacobs (Mike), Willingham, Hermida, Helms, Olivo, Cepicky, Abercrombie, and Mitre. In the entire starting lineup, everybody not named Wes Helms or Miguel Olivo had a grand total of 400 major league at bats (and Helms and Olivo are certainly a far cry from Delgado and Castillo--Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis are the only notable 2005 Marlins still on the roster). I'd say their owner is pulling a Major League and fielding an intentionally bad team so the team can move to Miami, except they're already in Miami. It is fun to see them do the push-ups after popping the ball up, though.
Lined with palm trees and orange groves, the drive down Florida's coast down I-95 is really beautiful, with a couple notable exceptions. The last time I was in Florida was for a waste-to-energy project with Dow. I learned that because Florida has a high water table, there are very few places they can put landfills, so the landfills they do have are extremely large. In fact, in some counties the highest elevation is actually a hill filled with garbage. Along my drive today there were only two hills of any size, and wouldn't you know it, both of them were landfills.
I arrived in Jupiter at about 10:30 after leaving Orlando at 8:00. When I made it to the practice fields there were some guys taking batting practice to my right. I was a couple hundred feet from the batter when I heard a ball being hit. When I looked up, it was coming straight for me. I reached up to grab it, and the ball bounded off my fingers and was retrived by a guy behind me. I should have known this already, but I had it reinforced in a pretty painful way: it's tough to catch a well-struck ball barehanded.
At the beginning of last year I got a little tired of hearing how all the Cardinals fans were going to fall in love with David Eckstein. He was described as the kind of guy who brings his lunchpail to the ballpark--he runs to first base on a base on balls, always hustles on every play, and works hard enough to overcome his lack of size. But I've discovered that he's more than just Pete Rose with an adequate haircut. He's a really nice and funny guy, as he continues to demonstrate. Last year at pregame warmups in Houston he enjoyed leaning into the first two rows of fans to catch balls being thrown by his partne, and today he stopped to pose for a few pictures, joking with the woman who was snapping them. Plus, he signs more autographs than just about anybody I've ever seen.
The thing that really cracks me up about spring training is how chummy the players and fans are. After Scott Rolen finished batting practice, an older woman complimented him on his hitting and asked him if he was healthy. He smiled and said, "Healthy enough." Later the same woman had a long conversation about an upcoming cruise that some of the Cardinals participate in.
The game was pretty decent. The Cards beat the Marlins, 6-3, in a pretty sloppy game that featured six errors. By far the most interesting game was had by Travis Hanson. He came in to play third base in the sixth inning and immediately got to work, collecting two quick errors. He had another error in the seventh. Then he hit a homer on the only pitch he saw and had a very nice defensive play in the ninth. For those of you scoring at home, he had a fielding average of .500 (three errors in six chances) and a slugging average of 4.000. Wow.
The Marlins had a fire sale in the offseason. Again. Here's the surnames that made up their starting lineup today: Andino, Uggla, Jacobs (Mike), Willingham, Hermida, Helms, Olivo, Cepicky, Abercrombie, and Mitre. In the entire starting lineup, everybody not named Wes Helms or Miguel Olivo had a grand total of 400 major league at bats (and Helms and Olivo are certainly a far cry from Delgado and Castillo--Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis are the only notable 2005 Marlins still on the roster). I'd say their owner is pulling a Major League and fielding an intentionally bad team so the team can move to Miami, except they're already in Miami. It is fun to see them do the push-ups after popping the ball up, though.
Saturday, March 4, 2006
Where Have You Gone, Number Fifty-Two?
On Wednesday night, the Aggies defeated the University of Texas in what is one of their two or three biggest victories of all time. Unless something funny happens, they should be headed to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1987. I wasn't able to watch the game, but my sister immediately called me to tell me what had happened. I thought about what it must have been like to see Acie Law hit that shot in a packed Reed Arena, and I thought once again about how far the program has come. Then I thought about what this must be like for the man I'll always consider the face of the Texas A&M basketball program.
The Fightin' Texas Aggie basketball team is my second favorite team of all time, but it hasn't always been that way. The first A&M basketball game I attended was during my freshman year there, and before that I didn't know any of the players or coaches. Before the 1996-97 basketball season began, I checked out one of the preseason publications to see how the Aggies might fare in the innaugural season of the Big 12. They were picked toward, if not at, the bottom, the lone bright spot being the potential of a freshman named Jerald Brown.
Jerald Brown came in as Mr. Basketball in the state of Texas, and he had an interesting college career. He had a great freshman year, earning Freshman of the Year honors in the Big 12 and setting an A&M record for three-pointers. Things went kinda wrong his sophomore year--the team went 1-15 in conference play, and Brown was mired in a shooting slump. It was an awful year that resulted in the end of the Tony Barone era, but the image that sticks with me from that year is from the lone conference win against Baylor. When I opened up the school newspaper the next day, the picture was of Jerald celebrating after the final horn by doing the hand gesture that sophomores do as part of Aggie yells. It's the sort of thing you would expect to see out of a zealous Corps sophomore but not out of an impromptu celebration by an athlete. I took it to mean that Jerald had really taken to A&M as a home, even though, given the support he had received, I wouldn't have faulted him for transferring somewhere else.
Brown's final two years were better but not great. Under head coach Melvin Watkins, Brown was no superstar, but he was a solid contributor and a much happier player. During his junior year he tipped in the winning basket to defeat an Oklahoma team that would eventually go to the Sweet 16, and the next year he had a couple of the greatest interior passes I've ever seen in a huge upset victory over #12 Oklahoma State.
When I was researching for this, I found an article from Brown's senior year claiming that "he had scholarship offers from major powers such as Kansas, North Carolina and Duke, but selected A&M because he wanted to be a part of a remarkable turnaround." I wonder what his reaction is to this overdue resurgence of the basketball program. In a sense, he is the ultimate forefather for this team: Brown's senior year was Bernard King's freshman year, King's senior year was Antoine Wright's freshman year, and Wright's final year was Joseph Jones's freshman year. But in another sense, it's hard to say that somebody who started ten years and two coaches ago can have much of a connection to the current team.
Which is unfortunate, because when you have a drought as long as A&M has had between tournament appearances, you're bound to have a lot of people who contributed in some important way to the team's current situation who will likely be forgotten. That's why I think Jerald Brown is the face of the Texas A&M basketball program. The players and the coach who will be credited with this turnaround are being rewarded with huge crowds and glowing press. The crowd that saw A&M take down Texas was about 4 times the average crowd Brown played in front of, and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of the current fans have even heard of him.
I hope that Jerald Brown can see the current team's success as, at least partially, the result of his own hard work, dedication, and loyalty. When I was in school, the football team was contending for conference championships, and there was a lot of talk about guys like Dat Nguyen and Dan Campbell as the embodiment of the Aggie Spirit. Losing teams don't often get the benefit of having fans identify with them, but I always thought that Jerald was every bit the Aggie anyone else was. He had to be. Between being in the Tony Barone doghouse and playing in front of empty arenas, he had to have something substantial on the inside sustaining him, the same kind of thing that now allows a more talented group of players to thrive at A&M. I hope all the new guys recognize the foundation that people like him have laid.
The Fightin' Texas Aggie basketball team is my second favorite team of all time, but it hasn't always been that way. The first A&M basketball game I attended was during my freshman year there, and before that I didn't know any of the players or coaches. Before the 1996-97 basketball season began, I checked out one of the preseason publications to see how the Aggies might fare in the innaugural season of the Big 12. They were picked toward, if not at, the bottom, the lone bright spot being the potential of a freshman named Jerald Brown.
Jerald Brown came in as Mr. Basketball in the state of Texas, and he had an interesting college career. He had a great freshman year, earning Freshman of the Year honors in the Big 12 and setting an A&M record for three-pointers. Things went kinda wrong his sophomore year--the team went 1-15 in conference play, and Brown was mired in a shooting slump. It was an awful year that resulted in the end of the Tony Barone era, but the image that sticks with me from that year is from the lone conference win against Baylor. When I opened up the school newspaper the next day, the picture was of Jerald celebrating after the final horn by doing the hand gesture that sophomores do as part of Aggie yells. It's the sort of thing you would expect to see out of a zealous Corps sophomore but not out of an impromptu celebration by an athlete. I took it to mean that Jerald had really taken to A&M as a home, even though, given the support he had received, I wouldn't have faulted him for transferring somewhere else.
Brown's final two years were better but not great. Under head coach Melvin Watkins, Brown was no superstar, but he was a solid contributor and a much happier player. During his junior year he tipped in the winning basket to defeat an Oklahoma team that would eventually go to the Sweet 16, and the next year he had a couple of the greatest interior passes I've ever seen in a huge upset victory over #12 Oklahoma State.
When I was researching for this, I found an article from Brown's senior year claiming that "he had scholarship offers from major powers such as Kansas, North Carolina and Duke, but selected A&M because he wanted to be a part of a remarkable turnaround." I wonder what his reaction is to this overdue resurgence of the basketball program. In a sense, he is the ultimate forefather for this team: Brown's senior year was Bernard King's freshman year, King's senior year was Antoine Wright's freshman year, and Wright's final year was Joseph Jones's freshman year. But in another sense, it's hard to say that somebody who started ten years and two coaches ago can have much of a connection to the current team.
Which is unfortunate, because when you have a drought as long as A&M has had between tournament appearances, you're bound to have a lot of people who contributed in some important way to the team's current situation who will likely be forgotten. That's why I think Jerald Brown is the face of the Texas A&M basketball program. The players and the coach who will be credited with this turnaround are being rewarded with huge crowds and glowing press. The crowd that saw A&M take down Texas was about 4 times the average crowd Brown played in front of, and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of the current fans have even heard of him.
I hope that Jerald Brown can see the current team's success as, at least partially, the result of his own hard work, dedication, and loyalty. When I was in school, the football team was contending for conference championships, and there was a lot of talk about guys like Dat Nguyen and Dan Campbell as the embodiment of the Aggie Spirit. Losing teams don't often get the benefit of having fans identify with them, but I always thought that Jerald was every bit the Aggie anyone else was. He had to be. Between being in the Tony Barone doghouse and playing in front of empty arenas, he had to have something substantial on the inside sustaining him, the same kind of thing that now allows a more talented group of players to thrive at A&M. I hope all the new guys recognize the foundation that people like him have laid.
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