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Well, the first official spring training game of the season ends in a 5-5 tie after 11 innings. As I’m sure you’ll read from a lot of fans today it was great to have baseball back. It always is. But it’s always tempered by the fact that it’s not our announcers. We got to listen to the Royals’ announcers, who really irritated me (more on that later).
I missed the start of the game due to it being on while I was working, but I tuned in just in time to hear Phil Nevin take one out of the park for a home run. In the third, our offense was aided by an error by Mark Grudzilanek, allowing another run to score, giving us three. It should have actually been a lot more than that, but we left the bases loaded in that frame against Jeremy Affeldt. Kevin Mench had a sac fly in the fifth, ending our offense. At that point we were up 5-0, and feeling good, as none of our pitchers had given up much.
In the top of the sixth, Buck Showalter made wholesale changes in the field – something that started me on the Royals announcers calling our entire team on the field “a bunch of players no onas hever heard of”. Oh, like anyone’s ever heard of guys like Mat Tupman or Ryan Baerlocher, either you twonks. Really irritated me. Anyway, the players that Buck brought in for the sixth were Jamie Burke 1B – Aarom Baldiris 2B – Joaquin Arias SS – D’Angelo Jiminez 3B – Jason Botts LF – Adrian Brown CF – Adam Hyzdu RF – Nick Trezniak C.
And that was just the fielders. Buck made a boatload of pitching changes – having used 8 pitchers in all. Josh Rupe started, and went two innings of shutoutball. Thomas Diamond followed, and went 1.2, giving up no runs, but did allow a hit and two walks. A little shaky, but got the job done. Of the 6 that followed (Volquez, Walker, Durocher, Wasdin, Diaz, & Mahay), we gave up 5 runs over 7.1 IP. 2 were by Durocher, who we won’t see in the bigs, and two were by Wasdin, who we will. The other was by Edison Volquez, who probably won’t break camp with us, but will be up at some point, I’d wager.
However, the guy of the day was our old buddy Benji Gil, who is still floating around. He’s in camp with the Royals on a non roster invite, and today looked good. He had a double and a triple driving in the Royals’ first and the tying runs. Another former Ranger was in this game, pitcher David Elder. David Elder is known for two things. First he was the guy we sent to Cleveland in a trade for John Rocker. Second, he was the pitcher on the mound when Rafael Palmeiro got his 500th home run (which I was there to see). Elder was pretty good in his one inning of work – he was perfect.
One final thing about the Royals announcers. They were riding Buck Showalter pretty hard about all the pitching changes. All I wanted to do was to tell these guys to shut up and announce the game and stop whining about the opposing manager. Especially when their own manager used two MORE pitchers than Buck did. The Royals threw 10 pitchers, we only had 8. Really irritated me. Remind me not to listen to thse twonks again, OK?
The game went extra innings, but I was forced to stop listening after 9 due to being called away at work for something. It’ll be nice to hear Eric Nadel & Victor Rojas tomorrow afternoon. :)

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