Scott Baker’s Arm is Responding Well and Other Bullets

scott baker twinsAll is well on the family front after a touch over a week with The Little Boy in the fold. We’ve got the nighttime “shift” thing down pretty well, with me covering 8pm to 1am, and The Wife covering 1am to 6am (and maybe a touch longer when she feels like hooking me up with bonus sleep time). The Little Girl is adjusting well, and certainly seems to think The Little Boy is fascinating and awesome.

  • Scott Baker is feeling good after throwing a simulated game, so he’s on pace to throw in a minor league game next week, and then a Cactus League game thereafter. He talks about the mental side of recovering from injury, per CSN: “You definitely have to marry the physical and mental together, because there’s a feeling where you trust it, you trust your ability to give it everything you got. There’s no holding back, you’re finishing all your pitches, you’re trusting that the elbow’s going to hold up, and you can tell yourself that all you want, but until you start letting it go and you don’t have any adverse effects, generally there’s nothing else you can do but fill that intensity and feel good about doing it.” His fastball is already up to 89 mph, which is a great sign. That would be fine this time of year for most pitchers who in-season like to sit in the low-90s, let alone one coming off of Tommy John.
  • Ian Stewart is doing all things baseball at this point, and says he worked out without feeling any tightness or soreness yesterday. He’s guessing he’s just a few more days from returning to game action, which would be an earlier return than we’d been expecting. It’s just a couple days earlier, but with Stewart battling to maintain his roster spot, a couple more games and the associated at-bats can’t hurt.
  • Patrick Mooney on Dale Sveum for the long-term.
  • Javier Baez on the multitudes of pitchers you’ll see as you march toward the big leagues (and then try to stay in the big leagues).
  • Anthony Rizzo’s Team Italy won again yesterday, blasting Team Canada in another upset. They’re now 2-0 heading into today’s game against Team USA (tonight on MLBN at 8pm CT), which lost last night to Mexico. Rizzo got a sizable donation to his charity of Dale Sveum and a number of players and coaches thanks to the wins.
  • Speaking of Team Italy’s wins, if you wanted to see Rizzo’s game-winning hit against Mexico, BN’er Corey found a video:
  • written by

    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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