Phoenix — Wearing a sly smile and a Rockies T-shirt, Carlos Gonzalez stood in precisely the same spot of the same clubhouse where I shook his hand and said goodbye six months ago.
“You keep trying to get rid of me,” said Gonzalez, laughing as he extended his right hand and put my palm in a vice grip that wouldn’t quit. “But I keep coming back.”
The poets wax poetic about the smell of freshly mowed grass, because opening day has a funny way of turning split-finger fastballs and sunflower seeds into Shakespeare. But, truth be known, baseball can be a brutal business.