6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

— Rogers Hornsby

It is still my favorite quote about the baseball offseason, all the anticipation boiled down to one perfect sentence, the kind of biblical brevity Hemingway could appreciate. We come here to see the figure eight racers of spring training: not so much the securely ensconced veteran (though there is a great deal of vivisection to that, too), but the ambitious young, and the cavalcade of fading men hoping for one last try.

Most of the people here, I imagine, are snowbirds looking to escape cold weather in the upper midwest; but not all of them, as the legions of Angels fans can attest. This is our fourth straight late March Arizona trip, and unlike the pleasant precipitation we got two years ago, it's dry as a bone and hot, too, with first-day temperatures in the high 90's. "Spring" training here is increasingly an anachronism; it's straight on to summer these days for the poor citizens of Phoenix.

We saw the Angels and Cubs duke it out with their respective aces, non-Bartolo Colon and/or Mark Prior Division. Colon hasn't been himself for a year now, and though he has promised an April return, nobody is sure what to expect of him when he faces major league hitters in games that matter. The same is true, only for wildly different reasons, for Mark Prior, who now faces minor leaguers with all the solemnity he can muster; after all, he has failed, for four straight years, to provide the kind of ace Chicago thought they were getting when the Cubs signed him to one of Scott Boras's notorious contracts. As has been true much of that time, he remains optimistic, blustering his way through the decision that needs to be made, perhaps painfully, some time later this year: starting the season on the DL, or at AAA Iowa?

With most of the organization's decision-makers, along with the team physician, staring down from a perch behind home plate, Prior threw 59 pitches. Thirty-two were strikes or swung at.

His curveball was decent, better. His fastball, which Cubs pitching coach Larry Rothschild claimed ranged from 85-90 mph, with "a lot of 85s, 86s and 87s," was erratic, often well above the strike zone and, again, suggesting he was not finishing the pitch, for whatever reason. Once, Prior left the mound re-enacting his finish from the wrist down.

He insisted there was improvement.

"You know, just throwing it," he said. "Trusting that it'll do what it's supposed to do, not really worry about the results, what's going to happen after you throw it."

The fastball, in particular, he said, was "not bad."

"I located that a little bit better," he said. "I threw down a lot better in the strike zone than I had. Threw some balls inside to lefties, knee-high, a lot better than I did the last few days. So, I think for the most part I was throwing down, you know, getting the ball down a lot better. Threw some good changeups, actually, too. … And I went upstairs a couple times on purpose. That makes it a little bit easier."

So speaks the man who once held the National League Central Division in thrall, but now only appears in the notes column of the Tribune, or when Jay Mariotti needs a dog to kick.

Therefore, today's game wasn't really about aces so much as about the men who have become their respective team's ace. For the Angels, that would be John Lackey, the World Series victor, who has become the Angels' most important homegrown pitcher since Chuck Finley, and one day may perhaps rival Andy Messersmith. For the Cubs, it was Carlos Zambrano, the least heralded of the Prior-Wood-Zambrano trio whose durability eventually vaulted him over the other two. Wood, whose injuries are now like clockwork, has opened spring training with a triceps pull, nothing to be alarmed of, but why not warm up your injuries when you're also warming up your fastball?

So to the game. Z actually pitched better than the record showed, since the leaden glove of Daryle Ward started at first. With the bases loaded in the second, Chone Figgins hit a squibber down the right field line — and Ward, doing his best imitation of David (or maybe some other statue, I wasn't sure), went late after the ball, with the predictable bases-clearing-triple ensuing. Had Derek Lee manned the first base bag, it would have been an inning-ending double play, but why waste your starters on every spring game, especially a hot one like today's?

The balance of the afternoon largely consisted of the Angels banging the Cubs' pitchers around some, with Howie Kendrick's three singles making for a good show, and Casey Kotchman going 2-4 in another fine outing that included a long fly ball that missed going over the warning track by only a few feet. Even Jeff Mathis managed to go 1-3, which for him counts as a revelation. Vlad made a fine running catch of an Alfonso Soriano line drive, the sort of play we fairly expect him to bobble these days. And finally, it should be mentioned that between Lackey, K-Rod, and Darren Oliver, the Angels managed to two-hit the Cubs' lineup, no mean feat considering the park and weather.

The incidental company was pleasant, too; I visited with my boss, Ron (also a sometime reader of this blog), out in the right field bleachers, and his family; and friend of the site Al Yellon, of Bleed Cubbie Blue, with whom we have had many pleasant exchanges. We say this every year: we must get together for dinner. I swear, it happens this time.

Recap/Box

Labels: angels