Diamondbacks Spring Training Round-Up: Dominican Delight

Quotes of the day

• "They haven't thrown very much, they've thrown a lot of side sessions. I think [Charles Nagy] is going to sit down and map it out from here until the end of the year. For sure want them to throw back to back one of these upcoming days."
  -- Kirk Gibson on the outing for David Hernandez and Heath Bell
• "We’re going to make sure he is 100 percent to go before we starting running him and playing him. It’s hard to predict where he will be two weeks from now... If for some odd reason he wasn’t ready and it was an extra couple of weeks, I’d rather have him for almost six months rather than three months if he has a major setback"
  -- Kevin Towers on the slow progress of Cody Ross
• "I want to make it look as good as possible but also don’t want to pull pitches or bring them. If you pull too many pitches, you’re going to get that reputation from the umpires and you might not get the call on a pitch down the middle because he’ll think you pulled it. I just try to be quiet, nice and easy, keep breathing through the pitch. That’s it."
  -- Miguel Montero discusses framing pitches

A contract extension for Goldie?

Yes, again... This one seems entirely to have been based on a Tweet by Jon Morosi of Fox Sports:

Diamondbacks and Paul Goldschmidt are engaged in ongoing dialogue about a multiyear contract extension, sources say.

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) March 19, 2013

Not really an enormous amount new here - it's something which has cropped up, on and off, for the past month or two, as we already documented. Neither Kevin Towers nor Goldschmidt were willing to comment on the story, but Jack Magruder reports that Goldie's agent, Joe Sambito, was out at Salt River Fields on Tuesday. Towers did say "there may be" others he's looking to lock up, with Ian Kennedy perhaps top of the list.

Keeping Miley back

With Wade Miley not having thrown more than two innings as yet, and with probably two starts left before Opening Day, it has been suggested we may re-arrange our pitching rotation a bit. Because of the early off-day after the first series, we don't need a fifth starter until April 9th, so we could hold Miley out until that point, and give him an extra "spring" start in instructional ball instead, to make sure he's stretched out enough. Gibson was his typical cagey self: "I'm not sure it will be that way, but it could be. I can tell you we have many different scenarios. We've got two weeks to go. I think I've been pretty consistent that many things can happen. I'm never going to pick my team early."

Deal for McDonald "percolating"

Going by what Kevin Towers said when speaking to KTAR this afternoon, it certainly seems John McDonald may be packing his bags for... somewhere. "I told him the clubs that have called, that have interest, and one's percolating pretty good right about now. Would like to put him in an environment where a) he gets to play, and b) that's closer to his home in the northeast." Towers would not specify the team in question, because the final details have not yet been worked out, but it does seem he has been open with McDonald as negotiations have progressed.

Around baseball

• The Dominican Republic won the World Baseball Classic this evening, three-hitting Puerto Rico in a 3-0 victory, to finish an undefeated run through the tournament, in which they won eight consecutive games. The Twins Samuel Deduno got the win for the DR, pitching five shutout innings of two-hit ball. Jose Reyes led the offense with a double and triple, while Robinson Cano was named MVP for the tournament, setting a new WBC mark with his 15 hits.
  
• The Angels and Brewers played a part of their game on Tuesday with balls and strikes being called from behind the pitcher's mound, after an injury took out the home plate umpire. While the third-base umpire was strapping on the protective gear, Tim McClelland and Jim Joyce covered all the bases. Said the former, "We didn't want people to sit. Both managers agreed to it, and I knew it wasn't going to be long. This way we didn't have to sit and could keep the game going."
• Here's Ken Rosenthal's preview of the Diamondbacks [alternative link]