TAMPA, Fla. -- For 12 years, he has been able to hop out of the dugout and trot to his position without having to ask for directions.
But then came Thursday, the first game of the rest of Chuck Knoblauch's career.
When he left the bench Thursday, he had that long expedition out to left field ahead of him instead of the familiar jog to second base. Suffice it to say, he noticed that, if nothing else, life as an outfielder meant some serious extra mileage.
|
ESPN.com analysis
|
|
The biggest hurdle Chuck Knoblauch will face will be to fight boredom. An infielder is involved in all of the action every time a ball is hit; even if he doesn't make the out, he's in on the around-the-horn throw. But a ball might not be hit to an outfielder for four or five innings. Fighting boredom and keeping in tune with the ballgame was the toughest part of the transition from infielder to outfielder for me.
Unfortunately for Knoblauch and the Yankees, every ball that is now hit to left field is going to be a bigger deal than it should be. Because of Knoblauch's troubles at second, there will be way too much focus on every simple play to left. Hitting the cutoff man, making the right breaks, judging the ball's flight, every little thing Knoblauch does will now be scrutinized. That kind of intense scrutiny is really unfair, because even experienced outfielders make errors from time to time.
-- Brian McRae
|
"I got 12 sprints in -- that's for sure," Knoblauch chuckled after surviving six innings as the left fielder for the Class A Tampa Yankees on Thursday, in his professional outfield debut. "I'd better increase my calories -- or I'll weigh 150 by the end of April."
Yeah, that road to left field is long, all right. But the road ahead for Knoblauch will be long in many ways. That road had to start somewhere, though. And it started Thursday at the Yankees' minor-league complex, down the block from Legends Field.
In the first game of Knoblauch's reincarnation as a left fielder, three balls were hit his way -- in the most heavily chronicled Florida State League exhibition game of all time.
He cleanly fielded a ground-ball single in the second inning -- and (gentleman, start your cameras) promptly short-hopped his throw back to the infield.
In the fourth, he made an excellent, over-the-shoulder, running catch of a floating liner to left-center, off the bat of Clearwater Phillies third baseman Travis Chapman. (No throw required. Third out of the inning.)
And in the sixth, he coasted under a routine fly ball by Clearwater's Alejandro Giron -- and made it look routine, with a casual one-hand catch. (Again, no throw necessary. Final out.)
After that, Knoblauch trotted back to the bench one last time, shook a bunch of hands and was told his outfield work for the day was done, while his fielding percentage was still perfect.
"We wanted to accentuate the positive," said Yankees coach Lee Mazzilli, who has been serving as Knoblauch's personal outfield tutor this week. "He wanted to go back out there and do some drills. But I said, 'No. Let's go home. You had a great day. Let's finish it.' "
So that's one day down, the rest of his life to go.
Day 1 couldn't have gone better -- for Knoblauch, for the Yankees or for the camera crews whose worst nightmare was the thought of Knoblauch standing around all afternoon without so much as a fungo hit his way. But who knows what tomorrow will bring.
Or next week.
Or, especially, April 2 -- Opening Day in Yankee Stadium.
Asked if he thought he would be ready to do this full-time, in real games, in real stadiums, in a mere week and a half, Knoblauch was honest.
"I don't know," said Knoblauch, who could play left field in his first major-league game for the Yankees on Friday when they play the Rangers in Port Charlotte. "But I do know I feel a lot more comfortable than I did two days ago. The more plays that come up, the more situations that come up, the more comfortable I'll be."
Except there are no guarantees those situations will come up in games that mean zilch, in ballparks surrounded by palm trees.
The spring-training clock is ticking. The time to cram for the games that count is shrinking. And no one can safely predict that when Chuck Knoblauch has to make a big play in left field with his team's fate riding on it, he'll be able to make it.
"I don't think I can say I'm a left fielder yet," Knoblauch said, after his first day with an "LF" next to his name in the box score. "I've got a long way to go and a lot of work in front of me. Maybe some day I can say I'm a left fielder. But now I just want to make progress, day by day."
Not many days remain, though. And make no mistake about it: For this Yankees team to work as currently constructed, this experiment has to succeed. Chuck Knoblauch has to be able to play in the field -- someplace.
The Yankees don't want David Justice to wear a glove any more than absolutely necessary. They have even less interest in Glenallen Hill ever wearing a glove.
So if Knoblauch winds up as a DH, it starts impacting the playing time of the power sources on a team that is otherwise short on power.
At the same time, this Yankees lineup functions best when he and Derek Jeter are taking pitches and grinding out a big-time on-base presence at the top of the order. So Joe Torre needs to be able to write Knoblauch's name in the leadoff hole as often as possible.
That's why everybody in the Yankees' brass except Emperor Steinbrenner was hanging around that minor-league complex Thursday, checking out Knoblauch's left-field act.
That's why every member of the New York media except Don Imus was on hand to record this monumental event for posterity.
The fate of the 2001 Yankees rides on this brainstorm in many, many ways. It's that simple.
"We'll see how it goes," Mazzilli said. "I don't know what will happen a week from now or even tomorrow. It depends on how he gets tested the next 10 days."
And it depends, obviously, on how well he passes those tests.
Knoblauch disputed the premise of one question that suggested escaping second base would lift a weight from his shoulders.
"It's not that much more relaxing," he said. "I'm learning a new position. I've got a lot of drills I have to do. I'm just trying to retain as much as I can of what Maz is telling me."
But if appearances mean anything, he seemed more relaxed. Then again, he couldn't have seemed more relaxed three weeks ago, after making a gruesome throwing error at second base in the first game of spring training, either. And that led to seven more funky throws (five of them errors) in the games to follow.
So all we know for now -- and all he knows for now -- is that he has a very different life ahead of him.
"It takes a little longer to hear the crack of the bat for sure," he said at one point. "It's completely different out there."
"The thing I missed most was probably just being involved in every play," he said at another point.
And when asked at another point how different the act of throwing is as an outfielder, he'd clearly thought that aspect through.
"There's definitely a longer arm arc and angle," he said, "just because you're throwing farther. There's not really much of a short-arm, like there is in the infield. You're just winding up and letting it go. ... Just get it back in as quickly as you can. That's all an outfielder's job is."
If first impressions are any indication, he has a chance. There are a lot of people walking around this planet who wouldn't have put on an outfield glove for the first time and caught that first line drive hit at him. We know that.
"That was a tough play," Mazzilli said. "He went a long way for that ball. He got a good jump on it. That was a tough play for your first play, especially with everybody here watching."
"It's amazing," Knoblauch said, "what instincts will tell you to do, even when you haven't done it."
But he won't have an instinct for every occasion, not for a long, long time. It's possible, in fact, that he never will. But in the meantime, the Yankees will plow forward with this experiment -- Knoblauch in left, Alfonso Soriano at second -- unless further developments force them to mull Plan C.
They can figure out that one later, though. And in the meantime, Chuck Knoblauch has some things to figure out, too -- such as how to fill those long breaks between the action in the outfield hinterlands.
"Hopefully," he joked, "I won't be like (Paul) O'Neill, standing out there swinging (an imaginary bat) 1,000 times. If you see me do that, tell somebody. So they can make me stop."
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.
| |
|
