Sunday - Work Outs and warming up

The camp begins today - we will get some BP, infield/outfield drills, pitching/catching tips and if you want in the afternoon some scrimmages will be going on.  Last night was a the opening night banquet and the highlight is when the "Rookie" campers give their one minute talk about who they are, where they come from and hopefully why they are there.  We have a bumper crop of rooks with about 40 of them in camp - early indicators have the camp as "older" (more or less meaning the average age is closer to 60 than having a mix of younger and older campers) -- but I am actually bullish on this class as I didn't see too many "out of shape" guys so when I handicap the teams in tonight's post it might be hard to figure out how who can play and who cannot!!  Good times.
The camp will have 8 teams this year even though we have well over 100 campers in attendance - the teams will be 13 and 14 players which is good for defense, but not so fun for offense since we use the full lineup for batting and sometimes hard to roll over the lineup unless you are scoring at a softball pace -- so hopefully at-bats will not be a premium this week.

A few notes from last night --

Tom Brunansky - "I didn't have a job a few months ago!" -- his comment when asked by a camper that he didn't think a MLB coach would keep showing up for camp -- obviously he was in limbo for about 6 weeks after Gardy got canned and we are happy for two reasons -- he is the hitting coach and that he is here at camp - one of the better camp pro's here.

Frank Viola - "I would have loved to received an offer from the Twins" - I ended up chatting with Sweet Music for a good 5 minutes - he is a new grandpa this year so things are good for the Viola's right now after having a rough spring - Frank had open heart surgery in April 2014 but is doing great.  But I specifically asked him if he was interested in the pitching coach position for the Twins -- My thoughts were that the Twins staff is not very good and potential conflicts in pitching philosophy -- I also knew he is working in the Mets organization which is stocked full of prospects and also a AAA job in Vegas pares in comparison with an actual MLB job I was wrong -- Frank would have loved to get the job for the Twins (he did have a phone interview with the executives) and he loves Minnesota -- so who knows, maybe in the future we could see Sweet Music back in Minnesota (probably only if Molitor's staff really stinks it up, so not sure if I am rooting for that).

Bill "Soup" Campbell - The actual first "free agent" in MLB - because of a contract snafu - Soup was a free agent after him and the Twins didn't come to an agreement on a contract after the 1976 season -- he signed a $1 million contract with the Yankees (which was "huge" back then) over a 5 year period -- so good money for the day - So Soup was a pioneer but a fun chat with him on how that came about and it was the door opener to free agent but in his words, "the best thing that happened for the players was arbitration and salaries really started rising", Bill mentioned.

We will be blogging this evening after my ever popular prediction blog -- which on Monday morning is always fun since I can't pick every team to finish first.....

~~ "You can observe a lot just by watching." - Yogi Berra ~~