Choice.
The email messages I’ve gotten lately have been focused more on Alfonso Soriano’s refusal to play outfield in 2006 — at least until Texas traded him (he’s made 1057 of his 1061 defensive appearances since then as an outfielder) — than on Jurickson Profar’s throwing setback that hasn’t seemed to affect his work at the plate at all.
More on Russell Wilson’s Monday visit than on Joe Saunders’s Wednesday arrival.
More on whether Kendrys Morales or Ervin Santana could help this team than on whether Brent Lillibridge or Pedro Figueroa might.
And that’s cool. Spring training’s roughly half over, and we’re all well served to ignore the day-to-day arm issues and the early stat lines, including the half dozen of you inviting me to e-celebrate Ian Kinsler’s slow exhibition start with you and the couple of you fretting over Mitch Moreland’s equivalent 2 for 11. They’ll both be fine.
While the Rangers scouted Johan Santana but turned away, they saw enough in Saunders to take Alex Castellanos’s roster spot away and bring the veteran lefty to camp, but there’s so little cash on the line with the audition that there’s really no reason to view it as anything other than added competition for Nick Tepesch and Tommy Hanson to get us from here to Matt Harrison, which may not involve all that many games that count after all.
Surrounded by news in other camps that Taijuan Walker and Miguel Sano and Ross Stripling and Matt Barnes have been slowed, or worse, with arm issues, I’m just happy that the trainers’ updates in Surprise have generally been positive lately.
And that Lillibridge may be giving Adam Rosales a serious push, and never mind the fact that Lillibridge hasn’t played just a ton of shortstop lately since Profar can always slide over if needed.
And that Prince Fielder is a Texas Ranger.
If the baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint, then spring training is that walk first thing in the morning to the kitchen in the pitch dark, hoping you don’t kick the corner of the coffee table.
For me, the best results-centric story of camp has been that Michael Choice is showing he may be ready for a meaningful role, and that could be huge.
Nobody has played more defensive innings than Choice, and nearly half of his 34 innings have come in center field. That’s not insignificant from a roster makeup standpoint.
Only one Rangers hitter has more at-bats than Choice, and though the sample size is super small, you’d rather the kid come out hitting .375/.375/.563 through eight games (which he has) than the .083/.214/.083 that journeyman Bryan Petersen has put up.
You’d rather see Choice taking advantage of the concrete challenge put in front of him, getting on the field (Craig Gentry’s back has kept him from making his first A’s appearance, with no timetable on when that might eventually happen), and serving notice that there may not be any reason to punt that supplemental first-round pick and millions of dollars to bring Morales in here for a year or two.
Saunders is set to pitch in a “B” game this morning against the Royals, and while I’ll admit I’m at least a little more interested to see how Luke Jackson fares in that same game, it will be worth knowing what the radar guns say about where Saunders is with three and a half weeks to go before 162 — not so much where his fastball is right now as where the separation between fastball and changeup sits.
One of you sent me a Joseph Conrad quote on my birthday Monday: “Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill.”
Fine, but Conrad wrote Victory in 1915, when 45 was decades closer to the end than it is today.
Birthday or not, this is always the time of year when I feel the youngest, even when my baseball team adds (just) its eighth player in his 30s to the 40-man roster, a veteran pitcher whose top bullet point may be that he never gets hurt.
This is a really good baseball team, and when it manages to trade one 30-year-old (Gentry) to get a 23-year-old (Choice) with the idea that he can make things better, and he shows up looking like there may be no need to go spend millions of dollars and significant draft power to get another 30-year-old (Morales) to bridge any perceived gap, well, the bottom of that hill may be inevitable, but now it feels even further away, and all I can think about this second is the next 24 sleeps and what waits with open arms right afterwards.