My weeklong sojourn to spring training wound to a close today in Hammond Stadium at Fort Myers, the third stadium in six days, with the Pirates losing to the Twins. That’s exactly what they’ve done all week in my presence, saving their one win and one offensive explosion for last Sunday’s win over the Yankees (the one game I didn’t have tickets for).
Today did give me the opportunity to see the Pirates take batting practice. Since I didn’t fly in until Saturday morning, I missed that chance last week at the Red Sox game and since they bat first in the games at McKechnie, there’s not much batting practice to be seen there. Today, though, they came out at 11:15 and hit for an hour while I literally stood as close as possible to the field to watch. The Twins’ ushers were nice enough not to make me move. (ADDITION: I should also add here that I finally got a chance to meet Dejan Kovacevic during BP, as he was down on the field talking to players, and he was kind enough to talk to me for quite a bit. As a result, I wasn’t exactly paying a ton of attention here and that’s why my below observations are not great.)
With the wind blowing pretty strongly out to right (all five homers in the actual game went that direction) it was a little tough to judge who was really crushing the ball and who wasn’t, but Jeff Clement and Garrett Jones (Tangent alert! Remember last spring when some of us [read: me] were laughing about the writers who kept talking about how huge Garrett Jones is and how hard he hits the ball? Holy crap, Garrett Jones is an enormous human being. That probably seems obvious, but standing like four feet away from him as he towered over a couple guys he was doing an interview with made that abundantly clear. I suddenly understand why so many words were devoted to that last spring.) both put a couple balls over the fence. I’m not sure if Alvarez did, but he does hit everything hard and he hits it hard to both right field and left field. Righties like Milledge and Tabata were spraying line drives all over the field, though maybe only a couple balls total went over the left field fence. It was nice to see the Pirates could hit the ball at all, though, because through three games this week I’d only seen six total runs.
It was also interesting watching guys take infield while BP was going on. Pedro Alvarez was really actually pretty slick with his glove and he showed some nice range. He muffed a line drive in the game (sitting above third base, it looked like he already focused on first base to try and double the runner there off and just took his eye off the ball), but after watching him in practice, I think he’ll probably be able to handle third in the big leagues at least for now. My uncle and I tried to find players to compare his build to and settled on Bobby Bonilla. He’s big and a bit bulky, but definitely not too big, per se. He also took about ten minutes to sign autographs after he was done hitting, which I thought was pretty cool since he certainly didn’t have to do something like that.
Close attention was being paid to Brandon Moss, who later extended his 0-for-19 skid to 0-for-22.
Moss mostly looked like he felt like this all day:
After BP, my dad, uncle, and I walked over to our seats and below us I could see a huge crowd around Joe Mauer as he signed autographs on his way from the bullpen to the Twins’ dugout. The old couple behind us during the game were laughing at how everyone in the crowd called Mauer, a St. Paul native, “Joe” like they knew him. Once he finished batting, a portion of the crowd left. Honestly, I wonder there’s another big leaguer as popular among his own team’s fans as Mauer is. I’m not sure there is.
After yesterday’s Kevin Hart disaster, Ross Ohlendorf was a sight for sore eyes on the mound. He worked quickly and threw a lot of strikes. There were several balls hit hard off of him (Jim Thome’s monstrous homer and Justin Morneau’s long flyout stick out in my memory), but he also didn’t get a lot of defensive help. Of the four hits he allowed, one was the aforementioned lapse by Alvarez and one was a poor route by Garrett Jones in right field that let a ball drop in. The Alvarez play lead to the Twins first run, which went down as earned but really wasn’t. All in all, he changed speeds really nicely to keep hitters off balance, his fastball touched 93, and he really had the sort of outing that you’d expect at this point in the spring
Here’s Ohlendorf pitching to Mauer.
After he finished his four innings, Chris Jakubauskas pitched a quick inning, by far the best of three I saw him throw this week, and then Javier Lopez threw maybe the best inning I’ve seen by a Pirate pitcher all week. He struck out Justin Morneau on some sloooooooow breaking pitches, then ended the inning with a groundout and another quick strikeout. He was changing speeds from 89 to the low seventies and had everyone off balance. Jack Taschner would’ve been as impressive if he didn’t allow Brendan Harris to hook a possibly wind-aided home run over the right field wall. Brian Bass was not very good, seeing as he blew the lead and the game against the Twins scrubs in the eighth and ninth innings.
On the offense side, there wasn’t much to write home about given that four runs was a pretty solid output compared to everything else I’ve seen this week. The Pirates scored four runs on a double (Ronny Cedeno) and three homers (Jason Jaramillo, Delwyn Young, and Jeff Clement). Young and Clement both hit their homers pretty well. Young is the one guy that I’d say has been hitting the whole week I’ve been down here, and it was nice to see Clement get his bat moving a bit.
No one else really hit, though. Guys like Brian Myrow and Steve Pearce were actually pretty passive at the plate, compared to the Twins’ scrubs who were up there to hack away at Brian Bass and eventually ended up winning the game for the Twins. It wasn’t a bad game by any measure; it was really an illustration of why no one takes spring training games too seriously. The Pirates’ starters got a lead, left the game, and subs blew the lead and the team lost. I still would’ve liked to see more offense this week.
Anyways, that concludes the 2010 WHYGAVS Gulf Coast Ballpark Tour. I still have a ton of pictures to post online, which I’ll do over the weekend once I get back home, and I have a really, really awesome story from yesterday to share that I’ll have in a post for tomorrow to go up while I travel back on home to North Carolina. After that, it’s gonna be full speed ahead into the season to try and work on some season preview stuff before the real 2010 season begins in earnest.
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