Almora rests after crash course
There was nothing involving a bat for Albert Almora on Saturday. Nothing involving a glove, either. Just a brief stop in the trainer’s room, followed by some time on a massage table.
“And then I sent him home,” manager David Ross said.
And what did the outfielder do to deserve such a light day at Wrigley Field? He ran into a brick wall. The one with gorgeous ivy grown in all over it, yet seemingly providing precious little cushion.
Almora, trying in vain to snag
a Kris Bryant fly ball off Craig Kimbrel, crashed into the wall in dead center Friday during an intrasquad scrimmage. It was an all-out attempt that left Almora shaken up on the warning track for a couple of minutes before he walked off the field. Definitely not worth it. “There’s a fine line when you’re sitting in this seat,” Ross said. “You love the mindset of Albert and trying to catch every ball, kind of throwing caution to the wind, but then it is a scrimmage. You’d like him to be a little more timid. And I don’t want to take that [aggressiveness] away from my players . . . [but] I definitely was concerned running out there.”
Almora’s availability for Sunday evening’s scrimmage was still to be determined.
Serious stuff
Given the Ricketts family’s ties to the Republican party and President Donald Trump, it’s always interesting when president of baseball operations Theo Epstein expresses himself in, let’s say, a different direction. He built to such a moment in discussing the effects of the coronavirus on baseball.
“The reality of living in this country in 2020 is you’re never divorced from concern no matter what you’re doing,” he said. “Whether you’re home with your family or running errands or working from home or trying to pull off a baseball season in the middle of a pandemic, the subtext of everything that you do is concern.
“Not just concern for yourself, not just concern for your families, but concern for your teammates, your colleagues, your brothers and sisters, your community, the country as a whole and the world as a whole — although certainly the rest of the world has seemingly managed their way into a better place at the moment than we have.”
This and that
The Cubs have effectively extended the dugouts at Wrigley by creating covered, dugout-like areas for players spanning a few rows of adjacent club boxes. This will help accommodate expanded rosters at a time when players are expected to remain at safe distances from one another.
Reliever Brad Wieck is having a good camp, about four and a half months removed from surgery for an abnormal heart flutter.
“He’s on track as anybody,” Ross said. “The ball is exploding out of his hand.”
A universal designated hitter? Nobody consulted veteran pitcher
Jon Lester, who has become a not-so-terrible hitter in the latter stages of his career.
“I told Rossy that I’m hitting in the games I’m pitching,” he said. And if not?
“You’re taking a pretty big force out of the lineup.”