ORLANDO — Four more things rattling around in my cranium…
1) My friend Corey Koskie officially hung ‘em up on Saturday. No wonder.
After spending last Sunday in hospital getting treatment for his 6-year-old son Joshua, who had hit his head and suffered a concussion, Koskie was reminded of his own 2 1/2 years in a fog.
So on Saturday, three days after he pulled himself from a game complaining of lightheadedness, Koskie decided to call it quits.
“The risks just outweigh the rewards,” Koskie told me, not long after he ended his comeback attempt with the Chicago Cubs. “The way I felt on Wednesday, well, it just wasn’t worth it.”
Koskie, 35, dove for for a ground ball in a spring training game in Arizona on Wednesday and said “I felt really weird.” He knew, at that moment, that he couldn’t play big league baseball again.
“I kind of decided, do I really want to be looking over my shoulder and asking, ‘How do I feel? Is it OK?’ after every single play,” Koskie said. “After everything I’ve gone through over the past 2 1/2 years, I know I don’t want to go back into the fog again.”
Koskie finished his career as Manitoba’s greatest baseball player (no, Russell Ford was not really a Manitoban, but a Minnesotan), a .275 lifetime hitter with 124 home runs. His best year came with the Minnesota Twins in 2001 when he hit 26 homers, stole 27 bases and drove in 103 runs and became the first third baseman in baseball history to hit at least 25 homers, steal 25 bases and drive in 100 runs in one season.
Officially, the record will say, his career ended as a member of the Milwaukee Brewers on July 5, 2006, when he fell backward and suffered a concussion while trying to catch a pop fly off the bat of Felipe Lopez.
2) I’ve watched every World Baseball Classic game that I can watch and I’ve loved every minute of it. This is a great event and should be played every two years, not every four as planned.
As a Canadian, nothing beats international sport, and this event has been so much fun to watch. It’s simply great to be watching baseball in March and have it mean something.
For me, spring training has lost its edge. To pay up to $40 to watch a Grapefruit League game in which the best players play no more than three innings is simply a rip-off. If you’re a fan of one particular team and you want to watch Single A players who could not make the Goldeyes but might make your favourite team someday, then spring training is for you. But frankly, I’ll take the World Baseball Classic every time.
Granted, it’s an event the mainstream media hates because the mainstream media hates being in Florida on the company’s ticket watching Single A players at spring training who won’t make the big team for five more years. And the mainstream media members who aren’t in Florida just like to follow the mob and rip things they know nothing about. It’s a bad habit, but like Barry Bonds, the hypocritical steroid issue and the Duke Lacrosse case, it’s something we’ve learned to live with.
Frankly, nothing beats a great international tournament at a time when baseball is charging $25-$40 a ticket to watch freakin’ practice.
Long live the WBC.
3) Here in sunny Florida, the outlook for the Toronto Blue Jays is not so sunny.
Insiders say that after Roy Halladay, the Jays have marginal pitching, at best, and the team’s hitting simply won’t be good enough to score the seven or eight runs a game they’ll need to win more often than they lose.
In fact, one highly respected seamhead down here in Florida has suggested that the Jays could lose 120 games this season.
Do you think that will get J.P. Ricciardi fired?
4) Remember the name Stephen Strasburg. Most major league scouts believe Strasburg will be, and I’m quoting here, “The greatest pitcher in baseball history.”
There are even seamheads here in Florida this spring who are drafting Strasburg in Fantasy Keeper Pools because they believe he is going to be great for a long, long time.
Strasburg is a junior at San Diego State who is 6-foot-4, 220-pounds and is the No. 1-ranked player in the upcoming Major League draft. He played on the 2008 U.S. Olympic team and is already called “flawless.” He has a 102-mile-per-hour fastball and an almost unhittable 80-mile-per-hour 12-6 hammer curveball that he often throws after setting up a hitter with two straight unhittable fastballs.
This season he is 10-0 at SDSU with 75 strikeouts in 34.1 innings, He has an 8-1 strikeout-walk ratio.
The last-place (2008) Washington Nationals have won the Strasburg Sweepstakes. If the kid stays healthy, he will be the next great big league ace.