This is how
baseball works unlike any other sport.
Michele and I were driving to 5 o’clock Saturday Mass, and I had the
radio on to the White Sox game. It was
the first time I ever heard Ed Farmer call an inside-the-park homerun. Talk about being put in a good mood for the
first Sunday of Lent. Just let Satan
tempt me the way he tried with our Lord.
Eddy Alvarez, a
non-roster player, did the honors around the bases, and what an interesting
story the 27-year old, 5’9” Alvarez is.
He got a late start in baseball because he went with Olympic
speed-skating first. How many
ballplayers at spring training can say they won a silver medal in in the 5000
meter relay, as Alvarez did in 2014 at the Sochi Games, and this after two knee
surgeries? How many Olympic skaters hail
from Miami, the son of immigrant Cuban parents?
Alvarez would seem to be in pretty elite company.
Alvarez signed
with the Sox as a free agent in 2014.
Last year as the starting shortstop at AA Birmingham, he hit an OK .263,
but with an eye-popping 62 rbi’s on only six homeruns. Alvarez credits skating with giving him the
necessary experience to handle pressure situations. Given those stats, he may be onto something.
How many NFL or
NBA players have this kind of back story?
The bulky and the very tall tend to be kind of blah. Alvarez comes with definite longshot appeal,
an Olympic star who wants a World Series ring.
Hey, it took David Eckstein, all 5’6” of him, until he was 26 to break
into the majors, so it’s not impossible, at least not on a Saturday afternoon in
March, the first weekend of Lent.
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