We’re in phase one of Spring Training, the point from when the players report to camp up until the games begin.
It has to be a difficult period for team beat writers.
There really isn’t whole lot going on to report about, other than occasionally having to react to news such as the St Louis Cardinals’ young pitcher Alex Reyes requiring Tommy John elbow surgery.
Most of the time, the word count that needs to be fulfilled drives the reporters around different players seeking a story or two about hopes for the season ahead, littered with stories of new players getting used to their new teammates, new pitches being added to a hurler’s arsenal, or a new batting stance that a hitter helps to propel baseballs, and their playing stock, to new heights.
The Oakland A’s are my chosen team and Jane Lee, the MLB.com A’s reporter, has ticked most of the boxes over the past few days with stories on Jesse Hahn “hoping to find early-2015 form”, pitching prospect A.J. Puk resurrecting his curveball and outfielder Rajai Davis’s return to the Green and Gold.
Long gone are the days, captured in Roger Kahn’s wonderful ‘Boys of Summer’, when beat writers could file a few stories and then have a drink with some of the players.
Nowadays, social media is as much a part of the job as writing the main articles. I doubt many people are interested in watching shaky 30-second footage of pitchers throwing in the bullpen, but all the beat writers post them all the same. It proves that pitchers are indeed in Arizona/Florida, that the respective beat writer is there too and the world is still turning. That’s essentially social media in a nutshell. I don’t know if there is a Twitter account that just has someone posting ‘still alive’ every five minutes, but there probably should be.
Anyway, the main news at this time of year centres around injuries. Alongside the Reyes blow, the key points so far have been:
Adrian Beltre has a strained left calf muscle so will miss the opening round of the World Baseball Classic for the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile Adrian Gonzalez is dealing with inflammation in his right elbow and it seems likely that Mexico’s lead player will have to sit out the Classic.
The Washington National’s Max Scherzer has casted doubt on his availability for Opening Day due to a finger injury, whilst another predicted Opening Day starter, the Baltimore Orioles’ Chris Tillman, will definitely miss that assignment as his ongoing recovery from a shoulder injury means he will have a delayed start to the regular season.
The Atlanta Braves’s Sean Rodriguez is likely out for the season having just undergone shoulder surgery after being involved in a car accident.
However, the early contender for most bizarre injury of 2017 has come from Kansas City’s relief pitcher Brian Flynn who will be out for eight weeks having suffered “a broken rib and three minor vertebrae fractures in his back” after falling through a barn roof. The Baseball Prospectus 2017 profile on Flynn notes that “walks continue to be an issue” for him, making it tempting to suggest he couldn’t hit a barn door with a baseball, but can hit a barn roof with his rear end.
