Don't be fooled by days off in the spring By Jason Kendall FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW Sunday, March 17, 2002 BRADENTON, Fla. - For anyone wondering about my chipped tooth, I'm happy to report that I got it fixed last week, and it looks like nothing ever happened to me. It was pretty amazing how they did it. They put some cement-type stuff in there, and I was able to play in the game that day. You really would never know that it was chipped. As soon as I got past that little problem, I hurt my left index finger and didn't play for five games. I'm not really sure how it happened, but I think it was from the constant pounding on my hand from catching pitches. I wasn't using my normal catching glove because it wasn't broken in yet, so that could have contributed to it. I was using Keith Osik's glove when it happened, and my finger got swollen. I'm back playing in games now, and I'm making sure I use my own glove because it's ready to go. I don't want people to start thinking that I'm injury prone. I read something in the paper about how I was getting all these days off because of my hand. Heck, I had caught four games in a row before I got hurt, so it was no big deal. You always get days off down here, so it's not unusual to take a few days off. You're down here to get ready for the season, and I think Lloyd McClendon runs camp the right way. He doesn't bury people down here. He knows it serves no purpose to run people into the ground. You're supposed to get time off down here. It's funny to hear people panic when a player has a day off. That's a given in spring training. You want to get in shape, get loose and have days off because once the regular season starts, you're not going to take days off. People should remember that even though I'm not playing in a game, I'm still getting my work done. It's not time off for me at all. I'm in here at 7 a.m. getting treatment for my ankle and thumb, working out and doing other things to get ready for the season. We're almost down to what some people would call the dog days of spring. That comes about a week-and-a-half to two weeks before the start of the season. It's the time when you really start to get anxious for the season. When that time come, you need a good diversion, and that's what makes the NCAA Tournament so much fun. It makes spring training go by that much quicker. There are several tournament pools being run in the clubhouse this year. I'm in so many of them that I couldn't tell you how many teams I have. One pool is being run by "Bones," who is our assistant equipment manager. His name is Scott Bonnett, but everybody calls him "Bones." By the luck of the draw, I got Maryland in his pool. I joined that one with Keith Osik and Mike Williams. Our other teams are Oklahoma and Florida South Atlantic or something like that. You know, a team that has no chance. Mike Fetters is running a few pools, including one I've never tried before. In this one, you pick your team out of a hat, but you use the point spread in the games. If your team loses but still covers the spread, you get the other person's team. For instance, if I had Holy Cross and someone had Kansas, I would have moved on in the tournament with Kansas because it didn't beat Holy Cross by enough points. That pool is intriguing to me because I have three middle-of-the road teams: Wisconsin, Oregon and Pitt. That's neat that I got Pitt because I can root for the hometown team. This also was the week that we made our biggest round of cuts. We needed to cut down because it's that time of the spring. I never got a chance to catch Gregg Olson, but I wish him the best. I hope he catches on somewhere, I really do. He never got healthy here, and time wasn't on his side. But he is a guy who has had a great career no matter what happens. He's a guy who was on his way to a Hall of Fame career when he got hurt in the early 1990s. Yet, he still had 217 saves, which is pretty amazing considering his injuries. I think he still has the stuff to pitch in the big leagues, and he's good people. I wish him the best.