Before you could blink, Ed Campusano (who had zero chance of making the major league roster this year and if it's possible, has less than that now) and Tim Lahey (who did have a chance, but most likely will wind up in Triple-A, after the Cubs "return" him to the Twins and then get him back as the PTBNL in the Craig Monroe deal) squandered a 4-1 Cub lead in the last of the 8th and the Cubs went down to their fifth loss of the spring, 5-4 to the Diamondbacks.
I must confess I didn't pay close attention to today's game, since as you know it's hard to follow on Spring Training Gameday and there was no audio/video feed at all. Plus, games in Tucson -- and no offense meant at all to several BCB readers who I know live there -- seem, if you are living or staying in the Phoenix area, as if they're being played on Mars. If you want to drive from metro Phoenix to get to a Tucson game at a reasonable time, you have to leave at 9 am. When you come back, if you're driving on a weekday, you wind up hitting the Phoenix area just in time for rush hour traffic, which is looking more and more like traffic in L.A.
All this is the short way of saying, I'm probably NOT going to the two games the Cubs are playing in Tucson (3/15 vs. the White Sox, 3/21 vs. the Rockies) while I'm in Arizona.
The Cub longball bats were trotted out today; Carlos Zambrano joined the fun by hitting one -- pretty rare for a pitcher to hit a ST home run. Micah Hoffpauir, who can hit but has no place on this team because he can only play first base, also homered, as did Luis Figueroa. I actually hope Jim Hendry can trade Hoffpauir somewhere, possibly an AL team where he could DH part-time, because I think he could have a decent major league career if he got a chance. He won't get it with the Cubs.
Z threw well. Rich Hill was wild, walking three in his two innings of work. Michael Wuertz appeared in a game for the first time and pitched an efficient inning, striking out two.
Tomorrow, there will be an audio feed of the game vs. the A's via MLB.com.
Since we have been discussing various postal follies here at BCB, let me tell you a delivery nightmare story that I recently had at the hands of FedEx. I collect caps, and in particular I have ordered a cap for each Olympics for the last few years. I found one I liked on a site from a small company based in New York and ordered it. This was in mid-February. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally I was going to complain -- and then yesterday, I saw what looked like a brick in the gangway at the side of my house. It was the box with the cap -- apparently, the driver had decided that my gangway, which has a locked gate, was the "side entrance" (that's what the FedEx tracking number said, anyway). There's no way anyone could mistake that as the "side entrance". In any case, the box must have been left, on February 16, on top of a pile of snow and not visible -- and then, of course, it snowed again, several times, and so it only became visible a couple of days ago when the snow melted.
The cap was wrapped pretty well in the box and in wearable condition, but I have called FedEx to ask for a refund of the shipping charge. Good luck, right?
I am hopeful, along with the rest of you, that the shirts you have all ordered will be on their way to you by the end of the day. We await developments.