Notes, quotes and comments

The above photo is from Wednesday night — Thursday morning here. Nick Punto high-fives Jon Rauch's elbow.

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The White Sox made a conscious decision this off season to de-emphasize power and focus more on baserunning and contact. The general assumption is that this was largely Ozzie Guillen's concept — he's been talking for years about wanting more players he can hit-and-run with — but whether it's his idea or Ken Williams', that's direction they took.

Which is one of the reasons Jim Thome is a Minnesota Twin this season.

So ... three games into the season, the Sox are 1-2, and Ozzie's take:

When we built this club, I didn't want people to strike out, and we did too much (Thursday). If they continue to strike out like that, then we find another approach. With the ballclub we have, we can't be striking out like that. If we continue to strike out like that, then that's the game we're going to have -- 3-0, 3-2, 4-3 -- the bullpen is going to lose the game because we strike out too much. And they can say whatever they want to say -- good pitching, cold weather, whatever it is. Too many strikeouts.

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Dontrelle Willis, sidelined for most of 2009 with a diagnosis of anxiety disorder, walked two men in the first inning Thursday but none in his next five innings. Has he beaten "The Thing"?

We can't be sure yet. This start was against Kansas City. The Royals have never been known to work counts, and K.C. manager Troy Hillman stacked his lineup with lefties. Willis got three double play grounders.

Jim Leyland's assessment: "It wasn't great, but it was OK."

The Tigers may need Willis to be a bit better than OK if they're going to contend.

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It took me a while to get my response to Rok Lesjak of Slovenian Baseball and Softball. (The "reply" address of his original e-mail just bounced back.) But I finally managed to get it through, and he responded much more rapidly than I did:

Baseball is not popular here, yet (Slovenia population is 2 million, small, highly developed country, with a lot of athletic potential ). And we are working on it. However, we play baseball here for 35 years now. In this period of time we established 7 fields, 4 of those you can "kind of" say that are baseball fields. But that's quite a achievement for 35 years if you take as a fact that we built these fields bare hand on a dumps of construction material, with financial budget app. 1000€ a year. Thats what we call " get to it with a heart ".

My encounter with Slovenian baseball

Geography class time. Yeah, I know — you came here looking for baseball. We'll get there. I promise.

The Republic of Slovenia, part of the former Yugoslavia, is a nation of more than 2 million people wedged in the mountains between Italy, Austria, Hungary, the Adriatic Sea and Croatia. It is not, so far as I can tell, a noted baseball hotbed.

There came last week into my inbox the following message:

Hi,

I was reading your notes about Twins outfielder Mark Dolenc. Coul you be so kind and tell me more about him, or, do you think he's going to make the Twins rooster this year, or ...

Kind of special request: Is it possible from you, to provide me his e-mail adress?

Best regards from Slovenia — EU,

Rok Lesjak

ZBSS media relations department

Now — I reproduce the e-mail with its misspellings and odd sentence structures with trepidation. I have no wish to ridicule Mr. Lesjak (I assume Rok is a masculine name; it sure looks like it to an English speaker). My attempts at Slovene would be far more pathetic.

I googled a Web site listed under the name and, with the wonders of Google's page translator, came up with this. And with another click of the mouse, a post to which I seem to be unable to link, titled "Mark Dolenc?"

The text must be easier to follow in the original, assuming one can read Slovene.

As best as I can tell: ESPN broadcast a Twins-Yankees exhibition game into Slovenia, where people involved in Slovenia Baseball and Softball took note of a player with a Slovene name — Dolenc. So they googled him, and found all the posts I've been doing about his spring training appearances.

And asked me for information about him, since I am apparently the ace of the Mark Dolenc beat.

I've sent an e-mail with some details of Dolenc's MSU career and biographical information, which isn't much. I suspect ZBSS is looking for a role model for Slovene athletes to interest them in baseball; Dolenc may not fit that bill perfectly. I don't know.

I just find the whole saga an interesting sample of this bizarrely ever-more interconnected world. Baseball in Slovenia? Who knew?