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Don’t panic over Sheets’ slow spring
By Tim Brown
February 21, 2010
PHOENIX, Az — What Ben Sheets would like to say first is not to worry about the next six weeks.
His elbow, which had a tendon repaired in surgery a year ago, is fine. He backed up low-90s fastballs with more low-90s fastballs when lots of scouts were watching in a mid-January workout, so the elbow really is OK, as far as he knows.
His head, which he tried to focus on baseball but mostly was consumed by rehab, is good to go. He stood out in the misty chill here late Sunday morning and wrapped it around a bullpen session with almost no effort. He looked vaguely like Ben Sheets again.
But, and here’s the thing, he’s not much for spring training results. And he knows after all this time off – he hasn’t thrown a pitch that counted since Sept. 27, 2008 – and after another birthday passed (he’s 31) and considering the Oakland A’s aren’t in the habit of throwing $10 million at any old whim with a name, it would be better to look sharp and dominant and generally ace-like from Day 1. And, actually, it’s not that he doesn’t care about making a good impression. He does. It’s just that his springs usually don’t look that pretty, no matter where he is or what he does or how hard he tries.
“Oh, they’re trouble,” he says in the clubhouse before he gets to the bullpen. “I don’t know why. Every spring I’m trying to get those sumsabitches out, just ain’t happenin’.”
Probably the problem lies in Sheets’ repertoire, such as it is. He throws a fastball and a hard curveball, so when one isn’t working, he’s down by half a repertoire.
“I throw two pitches,” he says, then laughs. “They better show up.”
Point is, he hopes no one gets too concerned. He likes what he sees and hears after a couple of days with the A’s, and he fully plans to be part of it right to the end, unlike in 2008, when his Milwaukee Brewers advanced to the playoffs just as his elbow was unraveling, and unlike last season, which he sat out entirely.
His goal is to throw 200 innings for the first time since 2004 – “Nobody has to tell me it’s been a while,” he says – and maybe show a few young men in this clubhouse there’s a difference between surviving a season and winning ballgames. He’d like to get back there himself, so he was swayed when A’s GM Billy Beane told him these A’s were ready to win, that a young and impressionable pitching staff could use a guy who wouldn’t mind standing out in front of it all and, by the way, here’s the 10 mil that Adrian Beltre, Aroldis Chapman and Marco Scutaro turned down.
“When Billy came in and before any talk about money he went on about how excited he was about this team, I thought he spoke honestly,” said Sheets, who could have gone to the New York Mets and Texas Rangers, among others. “Just the way he sold his team was good enough for me."
It’s true, the A’s are a bit on the small-market/low-revenue end to risk that kind of money on a recently repaired and untested elbow. But Beane doesn’t mind feeling out a high-end talent for a few months, then moving him to a contender if the Los Angeles Angels are too far out in front.
“Is there a risk? Sure,” Beane says. “But if we didn’t do it, having the cash in our hands wasn’t going to do it, either. Listen, we’ve got a long way to go. We started on the outside rail and still feel that way.”
Beane believes in this pitching staff, however, in a bullpen that was among the best in the game last season despite (and ultimately because of) the rookie closer and in a starting rotation that didn’t always look pretty but was very young and never stopped grinding and maybe grew a little hair on its chest because of it. In 2009, the A’s starter was 25 or younger 146 times. That’s ridiculous. Not surprisingly, the A’s ranked near the bottom of the American League in quality starts and starters’ ERA and innings pitched. Now they hope they will lead the league in learning from their young and dumb mistakes. Even then, A’s pitchers went one-six (Andrew Bailey-Brett Anderson) in Rookie of the Year voting. When the season ended, and they were 22 games out of first, a lot of them still were standing. That’s something.
“To think where they were a year ago today,” manager Bob Geren muses.
Now, to Anderson, Dallas Braden, Justin Duchscherer, Trevor Cahill and the likes of Vin Mazzaro and Gio Gonzalez – “A core,” Geren says, “that could dominate for years” – they add Sheets, country strong and game stubborn, who last was seen pitching through pain and injury and vials of Cortisone to get the Brewers to their first playoff game in more than a generation. He could have stopped weeks before, should have probably, but couldn’t.
“We were right there,” he says. “I wasn’t going to give the ball back then.”
He’s just getting the ball again, after an awfully long wait, a whole season gone in the prime of his career. The excitement is in his voice, in a Louisiana drawl complicated further by a bite of raisin bagel. He loves the opportunity, the ballpark, the challenge of the American League, all on a fresh elbow.
“Until a batter gets in there you don’t know where you’re at,” he says. “I can tell you at a later date. But what I expect is to get out there and compete. I’m here, but it ain’t rewarding yet. It’ll be rewarding after a win.”
Fifty feet from Sheets, Braden was timing his move.
“You learn how to be a real big-league pitcher from a guy like that,” Braden says. “Last year we were kind of learning on the fly.”
He wanted to know how Sheets’ mind worked, what he thought about in 1-and-1 counts, what he saw in hitters that Braden didn’t. Maybe he shouldn’t expect too much too soon. It’s spring, and they’re never that kind to Sheets.
“I think,” Braden says, smiling, “I’ll let him get his uniform on first.”
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For Job as Mets’ Starting Catcher, Caracas Will Have Been Worth It
By DAVID WALDSTEIN
February 21, 2010
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Josh Thole bought his fiancée a box of Frosted Flakes, a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, kissed her and walked out of the Best Western hotel in Caracas, Venezuela, for a three-day trip.
Thole’s fiancée, Kathryn Poe, who does not speak Spanish and was warned not to challenge fate on the streets of one of South America’s more dangerous cities, holed up in her room for 72 hours until Thole returned.
Over the three days, she worked her way through the cereal, ate peanut butter until she could stomach no more and demonstrated her ingenuity by toasting pieces of bread on the coffee machine’s heating plate.
“I was kind of proud of that one,” Poe said in a telephone interview. “But it was a tough three days. By the end I felt like I was literally starving.”
Patience and resourcefulness are two qualities every minor league baseball player’s girlfriend or wife needs in abundance, but the endurance Poe demonstrated for those three days in early October was remarkable.
So if it takes a few more months or years for Thole (pronounced TOE-lee) to complete his transformation into a catcher and make it permanently in the majors, they can both tough it out. Thole will probably start the season in Class AAA Buffalo, but he certainly appears on his way to a starting job with the Mets.
Considering the way he played at the end of last season — hitting .321 in 17 games for the Mets in September, after being called up from Class AA Binghamton, and then flirting with .400 in the caldron of the Venezuelan winter league — Thole, like his fiancée, has shown the mettle and determination to succeed anywhere.
Poe is originally from Owego, N.Y., population 3,700. Thole grew up 40 miles outside St. Louis in Breese, an Illinois hamlet, population 4,000.
Caracas on the other hand, is a crowded city of more than four million, spiced by music, food, snarled traffic and talk of baseball, but where kidnappings and other violence are all too frequent and where foreigners are cautioned not to venture out alone. Baseball players and their families have been targets of violence, too, which is why the winter league is blanketed with security.
Thole acknowledged he was concerned about going, but said he had been so focused on the experience he would gain by catching every day that he refused to be consumed by anxiety. He was told that when he arrived at the airport he would be met by a security agent for his team, Leones del Caracas, who would then pass him off to a Major League Baseball security official.
“I was still very nervous,” Thole said. “What if there is no one there when I get off the plane? What if I go with the wrong people? Then when you drive in from the airport, you see the barrios and all the terribly poor neighborhoods and I thought, Wow, this is what I’m really getting myself into.”
While Thole was in Venezuela, the country’s president, Hugo Chávez, warned the populace that war with neighboring Colombia could be imminent. Thole was also there when the mother of the former Mets pitcher Victor Zambrano was kidnapped for ransom.
Despite all of this, Thole not only persevered, he prospered, hitting .381 and driving in 28 runs in 44 games for the Venezuelan champions, earning him the nickname el Infierno, the Inferno.
Nevertheless, when the Zambrano kidnapping occurred, the Mets checked with Thole to make sure he was O.K. He said that he was and that he had no intention of coming home before his scheduled Dec. 8 departure.
But he also followed their advice to be careful. For the two months he was there, he ate outside the hotel complex only once, and that was with people who knew Caracas. Still, Thole said he came to embrace Caracas while he was there.
“It was a fantastic experience,” he said. “I loved it, and my fiancée loved it, too, except for those three days when she was alone in the hotel. It was pretty intense at times, but over all it was great, and the way people treated us was unbelievable.”
Passion for baseball is feverish in Venezuela, and even Thole’s brief time in the majors could not prepare him for what he saw — the rollicking stadiums, the cheerleaders in front of the dugouts, the blaring reggaetón music.
In one game against archrival Magallanes of Valencia, Thole was catching when he noticed his center fielder turn and stare past the outfield wall.
A brawl had broken out in the bleachers and the game was stopped for 10 minutes as the fans, players and umpires all watched. Thole went out to the mound and took it all in with the pitcher, whose name he could not recall.
“He shrugged and said, ‘This happens every day here,’ ” Thole recalled. “Then the police came.”
The first game Poe attended, she was driven to the stadium by the brother of the team bus driver. Driving in Caracas can get inventive, and at one point Poe’s car ended up on the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians who seemed not overly surprised.
Inside the stadium, she attracted curious questions from fans. When they found out she was the future wife of el Infierno, their affection grew.
“People were really very nice,” Poe said. “I met some wives who were bilingual, and they helped me out a lot. More than once I had beer dumped on me. But you know, it’s all part of the experience.”
So were the Frosted Flakes and peanut butter. Poe and Thole can do without those items for a while. The rest of it, they’ll take.
“You know what?” Thole said. “I would love to go back next year.”
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