Moose Hunting

In case you haven't heard, Mike Mussina had a rough outing yesterday. Its typically around this time of year when the dooms day fans come out of hibernation and start forecasting their predictions of death, plague, destruction, and a missed playoff spot for the Yankees. I've been visiting blogs for a few years now, and its like clockwork. Spring training starts, here come the dooms day prophets. Pete Abraham commented about this over on his blog, specifically refering to Mike Mussina's bad start yesterday. People have written Mussina off after his first spring training start. I for one thought Spring training was when you were supposed to get rocked. For starters, you haven't pitched competetively in months, if you were smart you were probably not throwing 100 pitches every 5 days, and besides doing some conditioning, you probably spared your arm from anything that would knock you out of competition for the first three months of the season. As a result you're pretty rusty. You'll probably start by throwing light and increase velocity from there. You'll also probably take it easy on breaking pitches. Mike Mussina's out pitch is a knucklecurve. The smart money would say, he didn't have it yesterday and quite frankly he shouldn't have it this early. In other words, wait until the season starts to begin assessing players. You won't be able to tell much from the first game of spring training.