Buster Posey To Return To The Field On Friday

Posey has been doing catching and hitting drills for most of the spring. The only thing that he’s been especially cautious with so for is baserunning, as he tried to slide for the first time since his injury earlier this week.

The Giants weren’t very active in the offseason, loudly proclaiming that the return of Posey was akin to a major free-agent acquisition. Counting on the seamless return of a player who missed the previous season is always a risky strategy, but everyone can agree that the more spring at-bats Posey gets the better.

Which he did. Last May, he did this:

There are two bits of “news” here:

What’s tricky is that blocking the plate can be instinctive for a catcher. Posey and the Giants are going to have to work hard to overcome that. But that’s why we have spring training. That’s not the only reason why we have spring training, but it’s one of them.

Now that this statement, which basically translates to, “Look, I just don’t want to talk to the guy,” has been released, I’m sure that this is the last time we’ll ever hear about this story.

”If I never hear from Cousins again or he never plays another game in the big leagues, I think we’ll all be happy.“Oh. I thought the consensus was that Cousins was just playing the way a 25th-man needs to play if he wants to keep his job. Apparently, if the play affects how you’ll be evaluated as a general manager at the end of the season, though, you’ll feel a wee bit differently.

”He chose to be a hero in my mind, and if that’s his flash of fame, that’s as good as it’s going to get, pal. We’ll have a long memory. Believe me, we’ve talked to (former catcher Mike) Matheny about how this game works. You can’t be that out-and-out overly aggressive. I’ll put it as politically as I can state it: There’s no love lost and there shouldn’t be.“The Giants will play the Marlins in a three-game series starting on August 12, in case you were wondering. The angry words from Sabean are sure to whip Marlins fan everywhere into a frenzy.

And that’s that.

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(Frankly, I should have written something much earlier than now, but I fell asleep just before it happened, and so I was basically the last baseball writer in America to see the clip and hope for the best but expect the worst.)

Here’s Joe, sensible as ever: