With 14 teams now training in Arizona, it's unusual for any two teams to meet more than 2 or 3 times in any one spring. But this spring, the Cubs and White Sox will play each other five times, including the pair of games they'll play in Las Vegas next week (Wednesday and Thursday, and both games will be on WGN-TV, and the Thursday game will be on the MLB Network). Despite the game being in a NL team park, both teams will use a DH (which you can do in spring training by mutual agreement), and the Cubs may use Aramis Ramirez as DH today. Also, last year's first round draft pick, Andrew Cashner, may pitch today or tomorrow. And Rich Harden will start a game by sometime next week.
Rick Morrissey says the only thing wrong with Carlos Zambrano is is that he hasn't won 20 games in a year yet. Even though wins for individual pitchers are more team-dependent than ever. He's right that Z has to focus and be more consistent. But I don't care which individual pitcher posts the win, as long as the Cubs win.
So Taguchi still hopes to make the team, despite being pretty well down the depth chart. And how did he learn English?
He played at the Double-A and Triple-A level in '02 for the Cardinals, appearing in 19 games with the Major League team. Being in the Minors gave him time to work on the language. He read books, but the biggest help was watching kids movies. A favorite? "Finding Nemo."
Finding Nemo? Wonder if he saw Jeff Samardzija there?
As I mentioned yesterday, there will be no TV or radio coverage of today's game. So, we're all following again on MLB.com Gameday. Once the game starts, incidentally, a link marked "Gameday Mini" will appear; clicking on this will give you a smaller, popup version of Gameday that you can keep up over BCB (hint, hint). An overflow thread, if you need one, will post at 3:30 pm CST.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
