Fred Lewis was on the radio this morning and he gave a sunny assessment of his post-bunion surgery rehab: “I’m happy to have on shoes,” he said, and everything’s “fine and dandy.”
Shoes: The first indication of a monster season. Say, does that guy have on… shoes? Whhhhooooah, nelly. Watch out. Freddie said he’s hitting the weight room a lot and has been joined in the Arizona training center by Pablo Sandoval and others. He’s gained more weight than in any of the past three years, not at the Giants’ behest but as “something I wanted to do myself.”
Keep an eye on that. Lewis couldn’t run or presumably even walk on his foot for a couple months, so the weight he’s gained might not be purely from hitting the gym. Why he needs to put on muscle, I’m not sure. Last year, bad foot and all, he showed he could hit balls far, though not with slugger-like frequency. Maybe he thinks he should bulk up to protect his body over the long haul of the season, but a slower, heavier Lewis might be a defensive setback, especially if he has to move to the vast spaces of our local right field. More on this in a minute.
The KNBR dudes asked Freddie if he’s beefing up to prepare for a move down in the order into a power spot, as the Giant brass mused about last year. From Lewis’s description such a move didn’t sound set in stone: “if they put me in the five-hole or whatever, it’s exciting to me,” etc.
When asked about the Manny Ramirez rumors, Lewis said Bobby Evans, the team’s director of player personnel, told him even with Manny on board Fred would still be in the lineup every day “because I was the future.” Evans said he’d be hitting third “or something like that” and they’d move him to right field “or something like that.”
If true, either Aaron Rowand or Randy Winn will be traded. Seeing how this information comes from a front office not known for sticking to its personnel pronouncements, cool-filtered through a young player shooting the breeze early in the morning, I wouldn’t hold it as gospel. I wouldn’t submit it as evidence before a court of law. I wouldn’t trust it to come over and water my plants if I went on vacation and gave it my apartment keys.
If Manny joins the Giants, Lewis could get bumped to fourth OF, a very busy fourth OF seeing how Aaron Rowand will need more time off, which Rowand himself admitted recently, and Manny will probably come out for late-game defensive purposes. Trading Rowand would be great and moving Winn to center, but I don’t see it happening until Rowand proves his second half of 2008 was a bad patch, not the beginning of the end. (And the idea of Rowand to the Yankees for Nick Swisher as discussed in parts of the thread here doesn’t make much sense for the Yankees.)
To protect against evil spirits and haunting personnel decisions, let us all chant three times: FreddieLooooo, FreddieLooooo, FreddieLooooo….
