Mmmm, Spring

Today, as it were, is the mandatory reporting date for everyone not a pitcher or a catcher to Spring Training, which means we are that much closer to the goodness that is baseball.

Even the weather up here today is playing along with the idea of a coming spring; there's a blue sky and the snow's completely gone from the ground. Okay, so it's a little nippy at 27 with a wind chill of 13, but you can't see that just by looking outside, promise!

Anyway. In a semi-recent post by Pete Abraham came up with a list of questions that need to or should be addressed in Spring Training. I thought over the next few days, I'd try my hand at answering some of them.

I don't have a ton of time at the moment, so I'm going to go with one that should be fairly easy to answer: Can Chien-Ming Wang recover from the ALDS disaster?

The short answer is yes.

Lest we forget, Wang was the only pitcher with a win in the 2006 ALDS for the Yankees; while his first start in the 07 LDS was a disaster, I'm thinking the failure of the second start had more to do with pitching on three days' rest than anything else.

It is, of course, also important to remember that without Wang we wouldn't have made the postseason at all--he won 19 games and missed an entire month. Who was the last pitcher to do that?

In fact, it could be argued that the Yankees' 07 failure had more to do with their anemic offense in games two and four than his pitching.

So in short, yes, Wang can come back, and I would even take it a step farther. I expect him to.



Right, that's it for now. Another one tomorrow or more later if a story breaks.