The Futility Infielder

I'm packed for my six-day Spring Training trip, which begins on Wednesday. I counted about seven different baseball-themed shirts as I packed. Bought a new scorebook for the occasion (one of those softball-style vertical ones that can handle lots of substitions; hey, I'd keep score at a tee-ball league), and a brand new ball to toss around. I've already broken out the mitt and feel comfortable telling Joe Torre or Jim Tracy that I can give them a few innings on back-to-back days.

Joining me on this trip will be my girlfriend's brother Aaron, a Milwaukee resident and die-hard Brewers fan who has been dying hard for just about any other brand of baseball one could offer ("I'd settle for Mudville vs. the Indianapolis Clowns!" he wrote). If everything goes as planned, we'll be seeing six games over the next five days:

WED: Indians at Yanks, Tampa (night)
THU: Marlins at Dodgers, Vero Beach (day) & Devil Rays at Mets, Port St. Lucie (night)
FRI: Cardinals at Dodgers, Vero Beach
SAT: Twins at Yanks, Tampa
SUN: Yanks at Tigers, Lakeland

I planned this trip when there was three feet of snow on the ground, and I'm going to enjoy this as if it were the first sunshine I'd seen all spring.

• • •

I'm taking my laptop with me to Florida. With any luck I'll be posting the occasional update later this week. Here are a few links to point out before I go:

• The New York Times ran a timely piece for my puposes on Sunday. Mark Shapiro, author of The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together, comes to terms with a modern view of the Dodgers move, one in which Walter O'Malley isn't the bad guy:

O'Malley was not just my villain. He was Brooklyn's. He was the man whom Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield famously placed in their own triumvirate of evil, along with Hitler and Stalin. But, as I began to learn more about O'Malley and about the circumstances of the Dodgers' departure, I began to discover that perhaps - forgive me, Pete and Jack - Brooklyn's hatred was misapplied. Could we all have been hating the wrong man all these years?

Shapiro, who as one might guess grew up in an abandoned Brooklyn, now sees O'Malley as fighting the losing end of a battle with Robert Moses, a much heavier hitter in city history. Moses was the master architecht of New York City for 40 years, building the bridges, highways, parks and other structures that have shaped this city. And he wouldn't give O'Malley the time of day. Writes Shapiro:

O'Malley pressed on. His letters to Moses suggest a little man in a boxing ring, dancing around a very big opponent. O'Malley used whatever leverage he could muster, all but begging for his support. Moses, it becomes ever more clear, could not abide him, nor did he have any intention of letting him build anyplace near the heart of Brooklyn.

Moses never wrote that he spurned O'Malley because he did not like him. But he made his disdain clear: as far back as 1954, he complained of O'Malley's "beefing, threatening, foxing and conniving." He had other plans for the Dodgers, or the New York Giants. He wanted them in Queens, in the stadium he was planning to build in Flushing Meadows. O'Malley took the best offer he had, which came from Los Angeles. That it also came at Brooklyn's great and enduring expense made him a villain, especially because the move made him rich.

Having grown up a Dodger fan west of the Mississippi River, long after the team left for L.A., I must admit that the extreme view of O'Malley as a villain never resonated with me. As far as my family's concerned, he brought the majors out west a time when it was long overdue, making it a hell of a lot easier to get Dodger games on the radio. That view survives even now that I live in New York. To indulge in some cloud talk, it would be nice if there were still Dodgers here and if Bill Veeck were a hero for taking the Browns westward, as he tried to before the Dodgers lit out. But what then of Fernandomania? And the rest of baseball history -- would Koufax have put it together in Brooklyn? What of the Miracle Mets? Or the Baltimore Oriole way?

I don't have any illusion that Walter O'Malley was a nice guy. But the baseball world he shaped has given me a pretty fair shake over the years, so I don't need to forgive him. Michael Shapiro feels that Brooklyn does. He writes: "...while Brooklyn may never love Walter O'Malley, it is time to forgive him. Nothing grand has ever risen on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where his dream palace might have stood. It makes the mind dizzy, contemplating that phantom stadium as a gift to Brooklyn from the man we always believed had broken our hearts."

• Jonathan Leshanksi, who runs the site At Home Plate and is the commissioner of my fantasy league, has a positive review of Shapiro's book, which has just been published.

• Also on the subject of Dodger history, former GM Fred Claire reflects on trading Pedro Martinez in 1993:

I will be the guy who traded a young Pedro Martinez. It was a major mistake on a couple of fronts. First of all, it wasn't difficult to recognize the talent of a young Pedro. Secondly, it was even easier to see that this was a very special young man who had a great personality and a great inner spirit to go with his talent.

It's the type of mistake a general manager can make when he gets too focused and tries too hard to fill a hole in his everyday lineup. Is that an excuse? No, there is no excuse for trading a Pedro Martinez.

Claire's soul-searching admission is offered up a sort of rambling open letter to the Boston Red Sox not to let him get away. Ssssssh, dummy, maybe the Dodgers can snag him back...

Yes, it was a stupid deal, trading Pedro to Montreal for Delino Freakin' Deshields in 1993. But in the grand scheme of Dodger history, Claire's got a pretty good entry on the positive side of the ledger as well: he signed Kirk Gibson in 1988. They still fly that Series flag and they still play the tape of Gibson's home run, so Fred's all squared with me. No further apology needed.

• Elephants in Oakland has had a good back and forth with a reader about the Miguel Tejada Situation and owner Steve Schott's intentions. Our elephantine friend also has an entertaining rant about the way the Internet has blown several recent baseball stories out of proportion.

Off to the Grapefruit League...