ROBBIE'S RETURN

As dispiriting as Robbie Alomar's 2002 season was for the Mets, it wasn't a complete suprise, considering Alomar is considered an overly-sensitive player, and he played on a rutterless team. However, it is just as likely that Alomar will return to form this season, in spite of playing at Shea Stadium. Alomar has traditionally bounced back from his off-years. On top of that, he will be playing for a contract this season. How much more motivation could a Met fan ask for?

Alomar was one of my favorite Yankee-antagonists during the 90's, and I sure hope to watch him regain his Hall of Fame form this coming season.

Bob Klapisch profiled Alomar in his column yesterday for the Bergan Record:

"I've done a lot of thinking, and I know I'm ready for New York now. I know what to expect now with the fans, the media, just New York in general."
He pauses just long enough for emphasis, then says, "I'm not just going to have a good year. I'm going to have a great year."

...Alomar will now be paired with Jose Reyes, the 19-year-old prospect who, despite never having played higher than Class AA, will be given the chance to win the shortstop job in spring training. It will be Alomar's responsibility to mentor the rookie, a task he welcomes. But he says the Mets have to help Reyes assimilate as well.
It's still a shock to Alomar that the Mets don't employ a Spanish-speaking coach or have any Spanish-speaking executives. The gap between the club and its Latin players is so wide, Alomar says, "There are players on this team, like Timo [Perez] and [Armando] Benitez, that no one knows about. Those guys are afraid to speak because of the language problems, and that's not right."

Alomar is pushing heavily for the Mets to hire his friend, Ray Negron, as the club's liaison to its Latin players. The Puerto Rican-born Negron once worked for the Yankees, helping Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry battle their drug addictions, and after working with the Indians, where he became friends with Alomar, is now employed by the Rangers.

The Mets are interviewing Negron on Jan. 15, according to Alomar, who says, "This is a guy who can help our clubhouse."
"We don't have a bad clubhouse, because we have great guys. But there were some little problems that we had," Alomar said. "We need to come together, be closer. Ray can help the Spanish guys, because they have no one to speak for them."

Alomar won't lie about his self-interest in this matter: Negron was at his side in Cleveland during his best year, 1999, when Alomar batted .323 with 24 home runs and 120 RBI.

Think the Mets aren't craving such production from Alomar in 2003? If all it takes is hiring a spiritual guru ... well, put it this way: when Jason Giambi insisted the Yankees hire his personal trainer, Bob Alejo, last year, the club made him a "batting practice pitcher" in a matter of days.

Of course, Alomar alone can't rescue the Mets. He hints the club made a mistake allowing Edgardo Alfonzo to leave, and, despite the impressive additions of Glavine and Floyd, says, "We still need another right-handed hitter. Whoever we get at third base has to be able to hit in the middle of our lineup."

Still, Alomar has every reason to look forward to 2003. As he put it, "All the little things that went wrong, I think that's in the past now. We're going to be a good team."
He says. He hopes. And just for emphasis, he crosses his fingers ever so tightly.

CHOCK FULL OF SPIKE

Here is an item that appeared in the current L.A. Weekly:

Legends: Spike Lee's Jackie Robinson Moment

It was still a clear and sparkling Sunday at Dodger Stadium, the grass more emerald and the sky more sapphire in the aftermath of a fierce, early winter rain than it could ever hope to be in July. I emerged from the dugout ¡ªl the dugout! ¡ªl into all this splendor and breathed deep. I barely took three steps before I heard it.
"Cut!"

I froze. The exasperated yell, brief but unmistakably Brooklyn, echoed off the tens of thousands of empty seats. Spike Lee was filming a commercial, and I had stepped into a live frame.

I was here to observe, but thanks to the oversight of a chatty production assistant and my own distracted reminiscing ¡ªl I've been a blue-bleeding Dodger fan since the late '70s ¡ªl I had become inconveniently conspicuous. "This is gonna cost me 10 bucks," the assistant muttered somewhat cryptically. I was mortified.

But soon I was immersed in watching Lee interview Ralph Branca, one of the very few Brooklyn Dodgers still around who played in 1947, the year Jackie Robinson integrated big-league baseball. That was a famously tough season for Robinson, a season that hit a nadir during a late-summer game in Cincinnati in which the fans, who might have been geographically Midwestern but acted culturally Southern, hurled every epithet imaginable at the second baseman ¡ªl before the game started. During the pre-game practice Dodger captain Pee Wee Reese, born and raised in Kentucky just across the Ohio River, stopped the proceedings and walked across the field to where Robinson was warming up. Without saying a word, Reese put his arm around Robinson in full view of the hostile crowd. The stadium went silent. It was a hush heard round the world.
This was the moment that Lee was re-creating for his commercial, one in a series of eight for ESPN called "Without Sports. . ." All the spots have played the issue for laughs, with contemporary fans in mind, except this one. "This was a real watershed moment in history," said the network's marketing director, Spence Kramer. "It was deeply poignant and affecting. It wasn't funny at all."

Lee, a prodigious sports fan with a particular interest in Jackie Robinson, proved a relentless interviewer of Branca, who remains as affable as Lee is intense, though both are direct and economical with words. How did Branca feel about Reese's gesture that day in Cincinnati? "I thought it was a courageous act," Branca said. "Pee Wee did it out of friendship and respect. It said 'Dodgers' on his uniform. That's his teammate. That was Pee Wee saying 'screw you' to everybody."

Down on the field I met Lou Johnson, who played for the Dodgers in the '60s with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, and now works in the front office. Johnson is graying but lean and fit, dapper in a black wool baseball jacket and knife-creased slacks. He played a season with the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs in 1955 before the integration led by Robinson killed those leagues off for good.

"I didn't play with Jackie, but I certainly profited from his act," said Johnson. "By the '60s the atmosphere in baseball hadn't changed that much." He deplores the decline of baseball as a sport of choice among black youth today; he's part of an organization called RBI ¡ªl Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities ¡ªl that was instrumental in helping to get a South-Central Little League off the ground some years back. "Kids need to know what we had to endure to get to the top," said Johnson. "Jackie integrated not only baseball, but other sports as well."

Lee, relaxing ever so slightly on a lunch break, concurred. He was wearing a knit cap, a bleary look and light beard stubble. "His contribution is much bigger than baseball," he said in his trademark Brooklynese, talking about Robinson. "He changed the American landscape. You can never underestimate the pressure he was under, of having the weight of the race on you." He paused to think. "The only comparable thing would be Joe Louis versus Max Schmeling, democracy versus the Nazis. Baseball in particular was so American, which is why Negroes weren't allowed to play for so long. That's why the moment in this commercial is so pivotal."

Dodger Stadium in December may sound about as forsaken a place as this city can imagine, but it lives in my affections as a dazzling proxy for a thoroughly inhospitable place where sports history was made. It is odd but logical, just as the Dodgers' move from east to west turned out to be. As Johnson drove me off the field in a groundskeeper's cart beneath the bright sun, I silently thanked Robinson for being in some way responsible for this private, pivotal, baseball moment of my own.
¡ªlErin Aubry Kaplan

BETTER PLAY LIKE MICHAEL JACKSON CAUSE THAT SHIT IS OFF THE WALL

Bob Ryan, offers a characteristically spirited take on the proposed addition of seating on top of the Green Monster. Here are some excerpts from his article in today's Globe:

Larry Lucchino swears the Red Sox have nothing but good intentions. (History majors: Insert the ''Road to Hell'' reference you know so well.)
''Our little joke over here is that when the subject is the ballpark, you have to take a sort of Hippocratic oath,'' explains the Sox CEO. ''And that oath is `Do no harm.' Anything we do to Fenway will not tamper with its magic and charm.''

We shall see. All I know is that when someone hits a baseball over The Wall this year there is a good chance a paying customer will catch it. Am I the only one not happy about that?

''I can understand your skepticism,'' Lucchino says. ''But I would argue that what we are planning will not change the look and feel of Fenway.''

Damn right, I'm skeptical. The Boston Red Sox really are putting seats atop the left-field wall!

They're trying to paint it as an appropriate response to some perceived fan demand, but it's all about M-O-N-E-Y and their desperate attempt to squeeze every available dollar out of their lyric little bandbox of a ballpark, which will celebrate its 91st birthday April 20. Are the Red Sox that desperate for money? Isn't this John W. Henry guy supposed to be a billionaire, with a ''B''?

The truth is the brass really doesn't want to talk about The Wall. They'd much rather talk about what's happening at the other end of the field, and as much as they deserve censure for messing around with the most famous landmark in baseball, that's how much credit they deserve for their other major offseason building project.

What they're doing is in keeping with the John W. Henry campaign promise to explore a complete renovation of Fenway Park. ''If this works,'' Lucchino says, ''it would tell us that further renovation can work. But we are thinking about both the short term and the long term. Right now our goal is to open up space and give us some walking and breathing room.''

The best thing about this project is that it affects the average fan. This isn't another high-roller deal like the 600 (excuse me, .406) Club, where all the rich people stand at the bar and clank their jewelry as a ballgame unfolds below. This is for the once-a-year guy and his family, and when's the last time anyone thought about him?

It takes truly creative thinking to maximize the potential of Fenway Park, which has an architectural ''footprint'' of about 750,000 square feet. All new parks have far more space to work with, and that includes San Francisco's Pac Bell Park, which doesn't look as big as most of the others, but which checks in at more than a million square feet. That's where it helps to have someone such as Janet Marie Smith on hand. Her official title is the Red Sox vice president of planning and development, but she is otherwise known as the First Lady of Ballpark Construction and/or Renovation. She was the guiding genius behind the building of Camden Yards, the model for all baseball parks built in the past dozen years.

She is a preservationist at heart, never having seen an exposed brick wall she didn't love. So she has certainly come to the right place.

Larry Cancro thinks we can trust her, and the Red Sox vice president of sales and marketing considers himself a hard marker. He has been with the team for 18 years, and probably knows the ballpark as well as anyone. He believes the new regime is very respectful of Fenway. ''I think we can make it much more livable and less confining,'' he maintains. ''But it won't be like Yankee Stadium, which was not the same park at all after it was renovated. What we most want is for people to walk in here and feel it's still Fenway Park.''

That brings us back to those foolish ''Green Monster Seats'' they'll be installing on top of The Wall. Lucchino insists that extensive fan surveys show there is a tremendous demand for them, that people would just kill to be able to say they watched a game from the top of The Wall. Shows you what I know. I would have assumed the Fenway diehards would not want to mess with the look of The Wall, period.

''It won't be a dramatic change,'' insists Lucchino. The plan is for three rows of seats, plus standing room, stretching from the left-field foul pole to the center-field bleachers.
''It won't be intrusive,'' Smith says. ''It's not a huge section of seats. You'll just see a few little bobbing heads out there.''

They will be group seats, by the way, and God knows what they'll charge. I'm sure it will add up to a nice hunk of change, but please don't tell me it won't de-Fenway the place to some degree.

The good news is that Lucchino says it is not yet a drop-dead, completely done deal, that all the I's haven't been dotted and T's crossed. He says there is a meeting scheduled for Tuesday with a fan group to get their input.

Maybe he needs to hear from people who like The Wall just the way it is. Where are all those weepy Fenway Forever types when we need them?