Daily Archives: February 16, 2007

Every year players get ouchies in spring training as a normal part of getting back in shape. Folks always overreact. The Yankees haven’t been in camp a week yet and they already have their first “casualty.” Steven White tweaked his neck. He left camp in a neck brace and got an MRI, but Joe Torre thinks he just slept wrong and will be back in action early next week.

In other news, Raul Chavez got the cast off his broken glove hand and could be catching bullpen sessions in about a week. He should be ready to go once games start in March. I still think he has no shot at making the Opening Day roster, but it looks like he’ll get a chance to try after all.

In these early days of spring training, reporters, bloggers, and fans desperate for any little bit of news cling to every comment made by the manager and GM, wishcasting and overreacting wildly to anything that seems to betray more than intended.

For example, at the end of his chat with the press yesterday, Joe Torre was asked if he got to see any of the relievers work out in the bullpen and if he saw anything he liked. Here’s his response:

“Kozlowski. I like his size and the fact that he’s left handed. I thought Veras was very good. It looked like he was hitting spots which is pretty unusual. Plus, Gator said to him ‘what was that?’ He says, ‘curveball.’ He [Guidry] says ‘No, no, no. Fastballs. Changeup.’ So, he felt good enough to want to do that today. . . . Let’s see who else was there. . . . Vizcaino I missed, I wanted to see him, but I was a little tardy. Gator said he hit his spots all the time and threw well. I though Beam threw the ball pretty good. Henn, I tell ya, Henn’s throwing the ball hard, and, again, he showed us that last year that we didn’t see before that. So it’s going to be interesting. I thought Villone threw the ball good. If you compare to last year, where he was at this time last year, because he didn’t have a good spring as far as pop on the ball.”

Using the list of pitching groups posted earlier yesterday by Peter Abraham, Torre mentioned the lone new guy in group one (Vizcaino), one guy from group three (Kozlowski), and one guy not listed (Villone) as well as every member of group two but one: Chris Britton, who was not only part of group two, but is a pitcher Torre’s never seen before in camp.

So should Chris Britton be worried? Probably not, but that’s the level of clue-hunting that tends to go one this time of year.

With that in mind, one thing that always interests me is the assignment of spring training numbers. If you’re wearing number 83 and competing with a guy wearing number 14, odds are you’re fighting an up-hill battle. So, what do the numbers tell us?

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