Sunday, February 26, 2006
Things learned while watching NESN coverage of Spring Training today:
-Three days of the Red Sox/Yankee rivalry spent sitting on the bench back in 1992 struck JT Snow as more intense than 9 years of Giants/Dodgers rivalry.
-When the Red Sox play the Yankees, even West Coast National League teams are aware of it and sometimes have the game on in their clubhouses.
-Even though a high number like 84 is very much not a fashionable thing to be in baseball (So Taguchi and his ilk excepted), Snow will be wearing it this season in memory of his father, who wore the number during his pro football career, and who passed away this offseason.
-John Flaherty will still be referred to here as the Albino Cave Elf, because he still looks like one. I want to say it fondly these days, but he makes it awfully hard by emphasizing how he's from New York, and all his family is from/in New York, and how he only came here because he's chasing a ring, and he thought he'd get it in New York, but whoops, that didn't happen.
-The Albino Cave Elf likes gettin' down and dirty. When asked about the rivalry between Boston and New York, he mentioned that there were a few brawls, including "some fights in the bullpen that I happened to be involved in." As he said this, his eyebrows shot up, giving him more expression than he showed throughout the entire rest of the interview. Clearly the prospect of beating the shit out of other players excites him. This, at least, is something I can get behind.
-The only thing Matt Clement will admit changed after getting beaned in the head is that it killed his stamina, for some unnameable reason. He said that, after that incident, he was bizarrely back to early-Spring-Training-like stamina, and had to painstakingly work his way back up. He also likened it to a car accident: you don't forget it, but you have to get back in the car and drive again.
-Clement already has a hint of goatee on the top of his chin. Tell us it'll stay like that, Matty. Please.
-Clement wants his pitching to be more consistent. Last year he thinks that "3/4, 7/8 of [his] starts were consistent." Matt Clement can do math. How do we know? When he was thinking about how many of his starts were consistent, he started to say, "six...," then he stopped, backtracked, and went with "3/4 or 7/8". How many baseball players off the top of their heads know to reduce 6/8 to 3/4? Color me slightly impressed.
-The best part of coming back to Spring Training with a team you know, as opposed to a new team you haven't been on before is, according to Matt Clement, the fact that "you know where the bathrooms are."
1:38 AM
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