TUCSON, Ariz.—Jason Giambi stepped into the batter’s box to face pitchers for the first time this spring—and he didn’t swing.
“I want to see the ball,” he said Saturday. “I want to track it. I want to see it out of (the pitcher’s) his hand, just make sure that I’m seeing it good. That’s always worked for me really well in the past—to be able to take my walks and swing at strikes.”
As a young player with the Oakland A’s, Giambi watched Rickey Henderson and Mark McGwire come to camp and watch a succession of pitches from an assortment of pitchers in the first few days of live batting practice.
So for the most of the first two days of batting practice at the Colorado Rockies’ spring training, Giambi left his bat on his shoulder.
Giambi, 39, will spell Todd Helton at first base just as he did the final month of last season after joining the Rockies and give manager Jim Tracy a powerful left-handed bat off the bench.
“I just have found over the years you get in there and you start trying to whack (away) and before you know it, your swing falls apart because you’re trying to catch up,” Giambi said.
He stood by the batting cage watching when Seth Smith batted. When Chaz Roe, a slender right-hander who played at Double-A Tulsa last year, delivered a pitch, Giambi said, “He’s got some Derek Lowe in him,” referring to the Atlanta sinkerball pitcher who previously was with Boston and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“For so many years, I’ve faced so many guys, that’s how I try to like categorize guys,” Giambi said. “Normally when they have that type of motion and the same arm slot, they usually throw the same pitches.”
That extensive data bank has served Giambi well. He was the Most Valuable Player in the American League in 2000, and his career output includes 409 home runs, a .405 on-base percentage, a .527 slugging percentage and nearly as many walks (1,262) as strikeouts (1,388).
Giambi was tracking pitches from left-hander Jorge De La Rosa, the last pitcher he saw Saturday. And then with his final round of batting practice about to end, Giambi took a swing, his first outdoors this spring. Paul Lo Duca, who was catching, said, “There he is.”
“I felt comfortable up there,” Giambi said. “I felt like I was getting my (front) foot down in time. I felt like I was seeing the ball. I was like starting to slow it down. I think that’s the hardest thing for the position players when they come into camp is to slow the ball down, so you can see, because everything looks like it’s a thousand miles an hour.”
Thinking he had taken enough pitches, Giambi decided “to swing at one just to see.” He lined a pitch from De La Rosa up the middle.
Since Giambi had said he was going to take pitches for a second day, Smith was surprised to see him take his first swing.
“That’s the hardest one,” Smith said. “You’re always a little timid. You don’t want to get blown up. You don’t know if your timing’s going to be right. And why he decided to do it against De La Rosa, I’ll never know. But it’s Jason Giambi. He can do what he wants.”
NOTES: Right fielder Brad Hawpe missed his second straight workout. He is recovering from an infection in his left big toe where an ingrown nail was removed. Trainer Keith Dugger said, “We didn’t want to take a chance of having him go out and run limping and injuring his opposite hamstring.”… The coaches and players from Long Beach State, where both Giambi and shortstop Troy Tulowitzki went to school, were at the workout. Long Beach is playing a weekend series against the University of Arizona.
