Juan Gonzalez hasn’t given up on his dream to return to the Majors.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The two-time MVP\u00c2\u00a0got one at-bat with the Indians in 2005, but he failed to win a Major League job in 2006 and 2007 and at thirty-seven years old it looks like his career has come to an end.<\/p>\n
He’s not prepared to accept his fate just yet though and the Cardinals have given him a Spring Training invite (they would probably look twice at any warm body right now, to be fair).\u00c2\u00a0 The odds are that he won’t make the team, but he’s helped his cause today by slamming a first-pitch, three-run homer off Johan Santana.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s an impressive thing to have on your Spring Training report.<\/p>\n
Hitting Santana now is a very different proposition to hitting him during the season though.\u00c2\u00a0 On his unofficial Mets debut, the lefty was catching a bit too much of the plate, which is not uncommon when a pitcher is simply trying to get his work in.\u00c2\u00a0 Santana pitched two innings, giving up three runs on four hits (a single, double, triple and homer) and striking out one.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Every year we re-learn the lesson that you shouldn’t put too much store into what happens during Spring Training.\u00c2\u00a0 No Mets fan will be worried about Santana’s\u00c2\u00a0mediocre start today and few baseball fans will expect Gonzalez to be swatting homers off Cy Young winners during the upcoming regular season.\u00c2\u00a0 But in the case of ‘Juan Gone’, the sentimentalist will hope that he will prove to be the exception to prove the rule that Spring Training tells you nothing.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we haven’t seen the last of him?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Juan Gonzalez hasn’t given up on his dream to return to the Majors.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The two-time MVP\u00c2\u00a0got one at-bat with the Indians in 2005, but he failed to win a Major League job in 2006 and 2007 and at thirty-seven years old it looks like his career has come to an end. He’s not prepared to accept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4462,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/4462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}