Dave Van Dyck reports from Glendale:
The defense part? “Way better than last year,” Guillen said. “We were so bad defensively that I had the (designated hitter) making errors,” Guillen joked.
The addition of multiple Gold Glove winners Andruw Jones and Omar Vizquel helps, but so does Juan Pierre replacing Scott Podsednik in left field.
Eschewing the usual ranting and raving about the idiocy generally informing Gold Glove decisions, let’s just take a second to acknowledge the two things this possibly means:
1. The team has sold Vizquel and Jones as players, not as mentor and bat, respectively.
2. Our friendly local sports media has postulated the above on its own.
Now, we’ve joked before about the new guys’ defensive achievements (Fifteen Gold Gloves! Screw you, Cleveland!) but could it be that people are actually taking the threat of Jones and Vizquel in the field seriously? In a world where the former is coming off three seasons of just awful defense (even in that magical 2007 Gold Glove season) and the latter here for . . . whatever it is. I have no answers to either of these dilemmas. But perhaps—think positively!—none are really needed, and this was all just a huge misunderstanding.
If Jones can hit, I wouldn’t mind him playing LF often to have Pierre DH. That is if the reports from ARZ are accurate about how good he has looked this spring.
Jones is easily a better crappy fourth outfielder than Scotty, Brian, or Darin ever were. I’m not worried, and like the previous poster says, all reports say he has been great this spring.