David Gonos

Just leave me alone already about my unused icons. I'll delete the shortcut to Duke Nukem when I'm good and ready. So I thought today, I'd run through a bunch of items I have sitting on my notepad that I've yet to relay to the constant reader. Some are Fantasy related, some are just baseball related, and some have nothing to do with anything.

• Things you will hear about on Tuesday's Fantasy Baseball podcast with Jamey Eisenberg, Eric Mack and myself: Emack's trips to see the Mets and Red Sox this past weekend, Albert Pujols' elbow reactions, Emack incessantly pounding on the table, sock-stuffing and my brush with El Duque when he first arrived to the country.
• With Dodgertown no longer after this season in Vero Beach (they're likely headed to Arizona next season), it got me thinking about spring training sites. When I came to Florida as a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, the Red Sox trained at Chain O' Lakes Stadium in Winter Haven, where the Indians train now. It's a nice area, but because of all the lakes, a road map of Winter Haven look like a dropped handful of rubber bands. In Lakeland, the Tigers play at Joker-Marchant Stadium, where they have since 1934 -- the oldest continued site for a team in spring training. If you go to Lakeland, you must -- repeat MUST -- have a steak at the Texas Cattle Company restaurant. I've been to Dallas and Kansas City -- the best steakhouses there have NOTHING on these steaks. Seriously. And if I hear you got the Cowgirl steak rather than the Cowboy -- you're dead to me.
• Speaking of spring training sites -- in my days as a high school catcher in Kissimmee, I actually got to play at Osceola County Stadium (Astros) and at Boardwalk and Baseball's stadium (used to be the Royals) years ago. Of course, back then, it was all in black and white.
• SS Jose Reyes' 78 steals last season were the most by an infielder since Dodgers SS Maury Wills stole 94 bags in 1965. It was also tied for the most steals by a player at any position since OF Vince Coleman stole 81 bases in 1988.
• At CBSSports.com, our GM set a rule that anyone that says, "SportsLine" (the site's previous name), has to throw a dollar into a pool for a pizza party. We're doing the same thing in the Fantasy group for the name "Devil Rays." But since we're just talking about the Tampa Bay Rays, it just costs you a penny if you say "Devil Ray."
• Mark Prior is now pointing toward a late-May/early-June return to the majors with the Padres. The Cubs have taken a lot of heat for their mis-handling of Prior's career in his early years. He essentially went straight from USC to the majors with little work in between. While that sounds like a scary story for David Price fans if he gets the nod out of spring, remember that it was actually the heavy workload the Cubs placed on Prior that did him in. Manager Dusty Baker regularly went over 120 pitches per outing with him -- especially in their '03 playoff run. The Sporting News did a nice job on that story this past week if you get a chance to read it. It's Homer Bailey's fans that should be concerned about overuse. DID YOU KNOW: Prior and 3B Mark Kouzmanoff were Little League teammates in an All-Star game in the 90s in suburban San Diego? DID YOU ALSO KNOW: This will be the fifth-straight season that Prior has started the season on the disabled list.
• I've caught a lot of flak for mentioning Mark Teixeira as a possible bust for this coming season. Here's one more argument against me: The only players with more extra-base hits than Big Tex over the past five seasons are Albert Pujols, David Ortiz, Alfonso Soriano and Alex Rodriguez.
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that reliever Phil Stockman gave SPs Tim Hudson and Mike Hampton each a pair of kangaroo testicles on a key chain (in Australia, it's like a rabbit's foot to Americans), and he told them to rub them before each start. When I read this I thought -- those things obviously weren't very lucky for the kangaroos! But then again, maybe they didn't rub them enough.