Spanning the Spans

I've got a soft spot for the Twins, and have for years; they're probably my favorite non-NY team. For one thing, the immortal Bat-Girl made them seem incredibly endearing. Besides that, as I've mentioned many times, I like Ron Gardenhire (a wise and twinkly-eyed baseball gnome), I loved watching Torii Hunter and Johan Santana, and Pat Neshak, and now I like Boof Bonser -- yes, just for the name, but what a name -- and Joe Mauer and, even though he is currently one of the worst-hitting starting outfielders in Major League Baseball, speedy bat-sniffing Carlos Gomez*. But right now I'm especially loving them, because they've got:

1. Longtime Eephus Pitch favorite Denard "No Relation" Span, who with every fleet-footed triple increases the odds that significant numbers of people will one day be walking around in "Span" t-shirts and Jerseys, and improves the reputation of a surname I've spent much of my life sullying. He's kicking ass right now if I do say so myself, albeit in a very non-power-y kind of way.

2. Craig Breslow, who was one year ahead of me at college, and by all accounts as well as my own very brief experience with him, is one very nice biochem major. His appearance against the Yankees tonight was... ah... well, hey, he did set a record. Let's just leave it at that. But he's having a really good year overall and hopefully I'll get to see him pitch again this series.

Anyway, the Yankees are back in the playoff race with a vengeance, but I'm still skeptical. Don't get me wrong -- this is a bit of a rebuilding year and if they can just keep things interesting into September, I won't complain. (Much). But it's hard to imagine that after playing mediocre baseball for nearly half the season, the Yankees will play significantly better after losing Chien-Ming Wang and Jorge Posada for the season. I mean, it's not as if they have top-notch studs on the bench, like Fernando Tatis and Argenis Reyes, ready to step into the void.

Wait... what?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present your first place New York Mets (and their Reyeses, or Reyesi). If I were Willie Randolph I would probably just unplug the TV, cancel my newspaper subscription, and take up either Zen meditation or heavy drinking.

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Last but not least, congratulations to my friend Dan, one of the best Mets fans I know -- not because of first place, but because he got married yesterday, in an incredibly beautiful ceremony in Connecticut. (And I say that as someone who doesn't generally go sappy during weddings... seriously, it was beautiful).

And? He didn't check the score even once.

Armando Benitez Has NO Natural Cow Sense

Spring training news and notes:

*The Mets have the right idea. They're occupied with trying to surreptitiously balance things on Luis Castillo's head -- bubble gum, plastic cups -- while the Yankees are getting into shoving matches with the Devil Rays to defend the honor of Francisco Cervelli. Or something.

*Logically, I realize it must somehow seem like a good idea to sign Armando Benitez... because teams keep doing it. But I'm damned if I can understand why. The Blue Jays must not have watched many Giants games last season.

*Young Yankees pitcher Ross Ohlendorf has "a lot of natural cow sense." That's good to hear. After all, how many promising pitching prospects have we gotten excited about over the years, only to see them fall short at the Major League level due to a tragic lack of cow sense? Never again!

*The Red Sox traveled by plane to a spring training game recently. The Twins, naturally, did not, and wise and sparkly-eyed little baseball elf Ron Gardenhire shared some old bus ride stories:

"... the bus catches on fire and Big Fella [clubhouse legend Wayne Hattaway] tells Tom Kelly, 'I'm not leaving, T.K. I'm going down with the ship.'

Wayne Hattaway is a great character, by the way, and still going.

The Dude abides

*Joel Sherman of the Post has a good story about Shelley Duncan, who sparked yesterday's silly "benches-clearing incident" by spiking the Devil Rays' second baseman:

Shelley Duncan Shelley Duncan once had a minor-league incident, in the Florida State League, when all heck broke loose on the field around him. He had slid into second base and the shortstop on Detroit’s Single-A team had thrown from an unnaturally low angle, at least in Duncan’s opinion, and nearly hit the sliding Duncan in the head. He chased around the shortstop all over the field as the benches and dugouts emptied. But he never did catch the shortstop. The identity of the shortstop: Current Mets New York Mets farmhand Anderson Hernandez Anderson Hernandez . And Duncan says the two became friends after the incident.

What's great about this is that Hernandez didn't even consider any of the usual macho posturing, but just turned and ran like the wind. Quite right, too, since he's about half Duncan's size.

Idle Hands Are the Devil Rays' Playground

You can only strand dozens of reporters in Florida with no real news to cover for so long before they will, out of sheer desperation, latch onto the first vaguely controversial thing they can find; it took a while this year, but the Yankees finally have their first good and meaningless spring training kerfluffle. (Unless you count Kyle Farnsworth mouthing off about Joe Torre, but I refuse to dignify that with the term "kerfluffle", because seriously: until you get your ERA down from 4.8, nobody wants to hear it).

So: Tampa Bay Devil (yeah, you heard me) Rays minor leaguer Elliot Johnson ran over Yankees minor league catcher Francisco Cervelli in a play at the plate, and Cervelli ended up with a fractured arm. Joe Girardi was upset that Johnson played so aggressively, risking injury, during a meaningless spring training game; then Devil Rays manager Joe Maddon got defensive. Now everyone's favorite gerbil, Tampa adviser Don Zimmer, who does not take kindly to this soft, newfangled, try-not-to-maim-your-opponent style of wussy-ball, has criticized Girardi. And the Yankees are muttering vaguely about payback. Betrayal! Violence! Revenge!

Well, if by "betrayal" you mean "Zim being a little grouchy," and by "revenge" you mean "drilling some no-name Devil Rays prospect in the ass with a fastball in a ST game". So you probably don't need to buy the movie rights just yet. Though I actually wouldn't mind a Yankees-Devil Rays rivalry, since if you have to watch Tampa play 18 times a year, those games might as well have a little added spark -- yes, this is the year everybody's picking Tampa to not suck, and I understand the logic, but I'll believe it when I see it.

That said, this particular mini-controversy is completely silly. The Rays player, Johnson, wasn't trying to hurt anybody; he only had a fraction of a second to decide what to do, he's trying to impress his coaches, he went for it. I think it was dumb, because you really should go out of your way not to injure anyone in March, but I can see how it'd happen. (The Twins' Ron Gardenhire, official Manager I'd Most Like To Have a Beer With, agrees with me, or rather I agree with him, because Ron Gardenhire is a wise and sparkly-eyed little baseball elf).

See?

There was no malicious intent on Johnson's part, so far as we know, and there's no need to "retaliate" -- this isn't Clemens-Piazza here, no one threw at anyone's head. These things happen, and frankly, while this may sound callous, the Yanks should just be counting their lucky stars it wasn't Jorge Posada.



Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about El Duque's proposed new delivery -- he's trying to lower his iconic leg kick in an effort to keep pressure off his bunion. Yes, I just admitted to thinking a lot about a middle-aged man's bunion; leave me alone.

While there are many, many people involved in this process -- El Duque himself, Willie Randolph, Rick Peterson, etc -- who know vastly more about changing deliveries than I do, it still strikes me as something of a harebrained scheme. And it's a little poignant, because the sky-high leg kick has become such a part of Hernandez's legend; I used to* try and imitate it when I threw the ball for my dog. It's hard to imagine him being the same pitcher without it.

But the more I think about it, the more this attempt by El Duque actually fits. After all, he didn't start drawing his knee up to his ear because it looked cool; he did it because it confused the hell out of batters. Hernandez is constantly switching speeds and arm angles just to gain a slight deceptive edge, and vanity is not one of his concerns, hence the eephus pitch. So it makes sense that when things aren't working, he's willing to experiment -- to try anything, really, however odd or unlikely.

If he's not already using a little dab of Vaseline on the ball from time to time, maybe it's time to start... after all the steroid scandals, that sounds downright wholesome.


*last week.