March 19-23 , 2003: The Grapefruit League, Florida

Spring Back to Life
Day 1 • Day 2 • Days 3–5: If It's Saturday, This Must Be Tampa

FRIDAY, MARCH 21
St. Louis Cardinals at Los Angeles Dodgers, Holman Stadium, Vero Beach

Our morning drive back to Vero Beach was harrowing. A camper-driving maniac wove through traffic on I-95, cutting off drivers left and right. Just after he darted into my right-hand lane, he slanted back in front of a fruit-hauling semi. By the time we reached the park, the maniac had won notoriety. As I got out of my car, a middle-aged Cardinals fan told me he'd seen the camper cut us off. "Crazy son of a bitch," he offered, sympathetically shaking his head.

As we our way into the stadium, we passed by former Dodger great Maury Wills giving a few young players a clinic on bunting. Wills fed a few balls into a pitching machine, then came around to critique each player's technique, pulling back an imaginary bat as he did so.

We'd arrived early enough to watch a considerable chunk of the Cardinals batting practice from among a sea of red-shirted Cards fans, including some overage autograph seekers zealously jostling with the kids for the ballplayers' attention. Familiar faces such as Jim Edmonds, J.D. Drew and Scott Rolen took their licks while manager Tony La Russa and hitting coach Mitchell Page looked on. Even light-hitting catcher Mike Matheny looked like a superstar in the cage, spraying the ball to all fields and even going yard with a couple.

The Cards fans were rabid compared to the Dodger denizens. The day's biggest cheer greeted coach Manny Mota as he pedaled in from right field on a bicycle, waving to the crowd as he stopped. Mota ought to be great in that pinch-hitting role he's held for the past twenty-five years.

I spent several minutes watching Dodger starter Hideo Nomo warm up, hypnotized by his idiosyncratic three-part motion — the best specimen Dodgers have had since Fernando Valenzuela gazed skyward. When Nomo's in his full motion, with nobody on base, his jerky starts and stops throw off a batter's timing, making him difficult, if not impossible, to hit (the man does have two no-hitters under his belt). But with runners on, he's forced to abandon his full delivery and pitch from the stretch, where he's much less deceptive. The previous day, Nomo had been named as the Dodgers' Opening Day starter, thanks to his strong 2002 second-half performance and a solid spring.

Against a Cardinal lineup that lacked only the oft-injured Edmonds and Drew, and amid an intermittent sprinkling of rain, Nomo was forced into the stretch at some point in each of his five innings. In the third, he dodged a run when Fernando Vina was thrown out at third base just before pitcher Matt Morris crossed the plate on a potential sacrifice fly. He surrendered two in the fourth on a quartet of singles, with Tino Martinez and Morris (!) both plating runs. Nomo's line for the game — 7 hits and 3 walks in his 5 innings — was far from sterling, but his ability to wriggle out of jams saved his day from being a disaster.

Morris was much more in command, allowing only a couple of meager singles and a solo homer to Fred McGriff (who at 39 looks a good bet to outproduce the undead Eric Karros) through his first five innings. But with the eighth hitter, Mike Matheny, making the final out of the sixth, certified genius La Russa sent Morris out for one more inning, and he eventually unravelled. After a two-out walk to pinch-hitter Mike Kinkade, third baseman Adrian Beltre beltred a homer to deep centerfield, giving the Dodgers a 3-2 lead.

The next two pitchers to take the stage offered even more intrigue than the starters. Eric Gagne, who emerged as the Dodgers closer extraordinaire last year with a season-high 52 saves, had been limited to four spring-training innings due to a line-drive-induced bruised calf. He looked healthy enough on this afternnon, breezing through a 1-2-3 sixth for the Dodgers, inducing two meager flies to the outfield an an infield popup. For the Cardinals, Rick Ankiel took over in the seventh. In his previous outing two days earlier, Ankiel had endured one of his all-too-common bouts of wildness, sailing a few pitches to the backstop and failing to retire a batter. Against the Dodgers, he struggled with his control and fell behind most of the hitters, but avoided a complete meltdown. After nearly being hit by a high pitch, pinch-hitter Quilvio Veras doubled down the third-base line, then scored on a Jason Romano single, which tied the game (Dodger reliever Giovanni Carrara having yielded a two-run homer to futilityman Wilson Delgado in the top of the seventh). Ankiel recovered to strike out Larry Barnes and escaped the inning without allowing another baserunner, much to the relief of nearly everybody in the ballpark.

The score remained knotted at 4-4 through the eighth inning. Prior to the ninth, the umps conferred with both managers, who apparently gave the go-ahead for an extra inning if necessary. It became necessary after the Dodgers stranded runners at first and third in the bottom of the ninth, with Jeff Fassero retiring Ron Coomer on a fly to center. Following a scoreless 10th, the P.A. announcer told the remaining spectators (some of who were actually napping by that point), "Folks, when you're out of pitchers, it's time to go home. This ones a tie."
Final score: Dodgers 4, Cardinals 4 BOX SCORE

SATURDAY, MARCH 22
Minnesota Twins at New York Yankees, Legends Field, Tampa
Back in the asphalt jungle of Tampa, the promise of a sunny Saturday exhibition between two American League division winners packed the house. The scoreboard cheerfully compared Tampa's sunny 84¡ weather to New York City's chilly 38¡. Though Aaron and I missed batting practice, we arrived in time to catch a flurry of activity in the Yankee bullpen. Under the watchful eye of Mel Stottlemyre, Jose Conteras threw his between-starts session, pausing for a few minutes to take instruction from the Yankee pitching coach. Several yards away, a non-uniformed pitcher wearing shorts went through his mechanics while an instructor looked on, and a few yards beyond that, catching instructor Gary Tuck bounced balls in front of Jorge Posada, who practiced keeping them in front of him. At last, the day's starter, Andy Pettitte warmed up while Stottlemyre and Roger Clemens looked on.

Apparently, Aaron and I had better luck finding the stadium than the bulk of the Twins regulars. Minnesota manager (and 2002 Futility Infielder of the Year) Ron Gardenhire had evidentally decided that spring training was time to practice spelling those tough names on his lineup card, so Corey Koskie, Doug Mienkiewicz, and A.J. Pierzynski took the trip from Fort Myers (along with tricky-to-spell reserves Dustin Mohr and Mike Cuddyer) while the Joneses and the Hunters stayed home.

Pettitte breezed through the makeshift Minnesota lineup, allowing only a double to Mienkiewicz and a single to Koskie while striking out four. Through five innings, he had faced only two batters over the minimum. Meanwhile, the Yanks nipped Brad Thomas, a AAA-caliber lefty (that 5.37 ERA in Edmonton is singing "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere") for a run in the first, as Alfonso Soriano singled, Derek Jeter followed with a rare sacrifice bunt and Bubba Trammell singled. Trammell, acquired from the Padres for Rondell White earlier in the week, provoked a bout of heckling from a loud-mouthed old woman behind me who was already deep in her cups: "Bubba! What a Bubba! Don't suck like you did when you played here, Bubba!" For the record, Trammell hit 33 homers and slugged over .500 in his two and a half seasons of toil for the hapless Devil Rays.

The Yanks eked out another run in the second on a walk, a fielder's choice, a wild pitch, two paperclips, a wad of chewing gum and finally a single by Robin Ventura. But they ran themselves out of another opportunity in the third. With no outs and runners on first and second, Twins leftfielder Michael Ryan snagged a Jason Giambi blooper and threw to second to double off Soriano, who'd already rounded third base. This prompted the aforementioned gasbag behind me to launch into a tirade about Willie Randolph's skills as a third-base coach. Beer and bile brought yet another series of complaints from her as rightfielder Chris Latham, fighting for a spot as the Yanks' 25th man, misplayed a deep Dustin Mohr fly ball into a three-base error. Not even an inning-ending diving stab by Giambi could console said Ol' Gassie, who was still yammering at Latham as he popped out foul.

Pettitte ran out of gas in the sixth, allowing the first two hitters to reach base before Joe Torre made a mid-inning switch to Antonio Osuna. Mid-inning pitching changes are thankfully rare in spring training, but Torre couldn't leave well enough alone, making three of the four I saw during my run of games. His next one backfired, as Randy Choate, cleaning up a small fire that Osuna had started, greeted Pierzynski with a pitch that ended up traveling about 400 feet, giving the Twins a 3-2 lead and fueling Gassie's wordplay on the similarities between "Choate" and "choke." Yeah, we get it, OK?

Up until now, the woman had been annoying only me and a few others within earshot, making us cringe when she referred to Hideki Matsui as "Chop Suey" as he flew out in the sixth and berating a skinny, adorable 18-year-old Japanese girl in front of us dressed in a hooded cloth Godzilla costume (photo to come) when she stood up during Matsui's at-bats. But Gassie reached her zenith during the seventh-inning stretch. An obnoxious "U-S-A! U-S-A!" chant took hold among the fans after Kate Smith's "God Bless America", prompting Ol' Gassie to begin shrieking at the top of her lungs: "KILL THE BASTARD! KILL THE BAAAAAAASTARRRRRRRD!" At that point I was unsure whether she meant Randoph, Latham, Choate, Matsui, or Saddam Hussein, and so was her obviously embarrassed husband. He offered a blanket apology to the fans around him, sheepishly announcing, "Sorry folks, it sounds like the alcohol's doing the talking." Nevertheless, Gassie kept on spewing enough to win the title of Worst Fan Ever to Sit Behind Me.

The Yanks tied the game in the bottom of the seventh, but gave the run right back in the eighth. Three singles off of Choate brought one run, and only a Latham throw to nail Shane Andrews at third on a run-scoring single could snuff out the inning. The ninth brought our first look at Juan Acevedo, the portly former closer for the Tigers brought in by the Yanks as bullpen insurance via a minor-league deal. After giving up a long fly out and a triple into the gap by Mohr, Acevedo blew the next two hitters away, including the overall #1 pick in the 2001 draft, catcher Joe Mauer. Meanwhile, Twins reliever Mike Nakamura, an Australian import, mowed through the Yankee lineup (still mostly starters rather than scrubs) the final two frames, striking out Soriano to end the ballgame. Hey, as long as it made Gassie unhappy, was it really that bad?
Final score, Twins 4, Yankees 3 BOX SCORE

SUNDAY, MARCH 23
New York Yankees at Detroit Tigers, Joker Marchant Stadium, Lakeland
Through our trip's first five days, we'd endured the occasional sprinkling here and the odd torrential downpour there without an inning of our precious ballgames being lost (though we took cover for an inning during the Dodgers-Cardinals game). On Sunday, our luck ran out, as we awoke to a driving rain. After failing in several attempts to check the game's status on the Tigers ticket line, we figured what the hell and headed up the road to Lakeland, hoping we could outpace the thunderstorm. Aaron's flight was scheduled out of Tampa at 5 PM, so our hope was to catch at least the first five or six innings of the game before we split.

Our optimism was unfounded, as every mile down the road brought us closer to the heart of a major storm. Still we hoped. Arriving at Joker Marchant Stadium (named for Lakeland's former parks and recreation director), the Tigers' parking lot attendants gladly took our nonrefundable $5 for parking, knowing that the downtrodden franchise needed to bleed fans for every penny it could to pay off the ridiculous contracts the Randy Smith regime had bestowed on the likes of Bobby Higginson and Damion Easley.

Upon entering the park, we inspected the field, sitting for several minutes in the covered portion of the stadium high up. Two men from the grounds crew waded through the quagmire to keep the charade going, squeegieing off the Astro-turfed on-deck circles while the infield tarp drizzled more water onto them. This hapless display sent us wandering around the stadium's sheltered concourse, which was quite crowded. We stood in line for a booth offering three radar-clocked pitches for a dollar, with a guess of the correct speed on the third pitch yielding a free Tigers batting helmet. Without the benefit of a proper warm-up in the cool damp conditions, I couldn't even break 50 MPH, though I did receive three baseball cards (Jason Giambi, Mark Mulder and Mo Vaughn) for my efforts. Aaron topped me with pitches of 52, 53 and 55 MPH (missing his guess of 54 on the third pitch) and a Barry Bonds card.

After about an hour of milling around and the game obviously toast every which way but officially, we gave up and left Joker Marchant, heading back to Tampa for some NCAA tournament basketball. Our Grapefruit League stay had run out of juice.
Final score, Rain 1, Aaron and Jay 5.

Epilogue
Our trip had provided us with just about as much baseball as we could take, and a few interesting story lines which took us into the regular season's first week:

• Erick Almonte, slated to languish behind Derek Jeter for another year at Columbus, was recalled and pressed into major-league duty when Jeter dislocated his shoulder in a violent collision on Opening Day. Despite his woes when we saw him, Chris Latham made the club, as did Jason Anderson, who surprised many by beating out Randy Choate.

• Guillermo Mota began the season by serving a five-day suspension for his role in the Piazza fiasco. Tom Martin made the Dodger roster, while Giovanni Carrara, a mainstay of the bullpen for the past two seasons, was cut. Troy Brohawn was recalled from Las Vegas a week into the season, as was Ron Coomer.

• Tony Clark continued his strong spring run. After being sent down to accommodate Piazza's suspension, was recalled by the Mets and found himself in the starting lineup when Mo Vaughn injured himself trying to devour a whole cow.

• David Cone made the Mets rotation. On April 4, he made his first start at Shea Stadium in over 10 years and his first in the bigs in almost 18 months. On a cold and miserable night, Cone tossed five shutout innings at the Montreal Expos, striking out Vladimir Guerrero twice, including once with the bases loaded, for his 194th career victory.