Idled Mazzone missing majors
He’s got plenty of free time and still is being paid handsomely by the Baltimore Orioles, so there’s really no limit to what Leo Mazzone can do this spring.
He’s played golf, visited a few nice restaurants with his wife and planted strawberries, blueberries, onions and tomatoes in the backyard of their lavish new home in Roswell, Ga. Yet, Mazzone can’t remember ever feeling so useless, exasperated and miserable.
“What I’m doing is sitting here dying to get back into baseball again,” Mazzone said. “When spring training hit, it was the first time in 40 years I wasn’t on the baseball field. It affected me pretty good.”
After the Orioles fired him last October with one season left on a $1.5 million, three-year deal, Mazzone was guaranteed a salary in 2008 without having to leave his house. “Everybody says, ‘Just relax and enjoy your time, your contract runs through Oct. 31,’ ” he said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I enjoy myself when I’m down in that bullpen working with pitchers, and I miss the whole love affair with the major leagues I’ve had since I was 9 years old.”
Gagne loses closer role
The Brewers yanked Eric Gagne from the closer’s role in Milwaukee after the reliever called his latest performance embarrassing and said he didn’t feel he deserved to pitch the ninth anymore.
Manager Ned Yost will use a closer by committee approach while Gagne takes what Yost called a “mental break.”
Gagne signed a $10 million, one-year contract with the Brewers days before the Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drugs included his name.
Reds bat out of order
At New York, the Cincinnati Reds batted out of order in the ninth inning of an 8-3 loss to the Mets, resulting in a 10-minute delay as umpires and managers sorted out the confusion.
Backup catcher David Ross came to the plate to lead off the inning and lined out.
But the batter in the No. 8 spot should have been outfielder Corey Patterson, with Ross hitting ninth after an earlier double switch.
Patterson was charged with the out, which officially counts as a putout by the catcher, and Ross came up again.
This time, he singled.
New York won 8-3.