(670 The Score) With 24 more days left to get ready for the regular season, MLB teams are going to be in a hurry in spring training to get their players prepared after the end of the lockout.
Of course, the key is to avoid being in too big of a hurry, as health is paramount.
"The bottom line is we must be prepared for 162 games," White Sox manager Tony La Russa said Sunday. "Health is going to be our priority. I would rather lose a game than lose a player or pitcher. We must stay on top of it and make good sense and know everybody in baseball is going through the same thing."
La Russa and the White Sox are focused on preventing their players from overdoing it early on in their training after a winter of working on their own.
"We know the roster will not be completely here (Sunday)," La Russa said. "There are some TBD, so if you count tomorrow, there are 24 days and the perception is you can do a decent job with your everyday players. The pitchers will be a whole bunch of different situations depending on how much they have thrown."
Protecting pitchers will be the most important task, and La Russa didn't rule out the White Sox using a six-man rotation in April in order to lighten the initial workload for the staff. He added the sixth slot in such a rotation would basically be a bullpen game rather than a traditional starter who goes deep into a game.
"Everybody is worrying about the arms," La Russa said. "If you use the (usual) six-week camp intelligently and you get the work in, the starters can throw 100 pitches.
This will not be six weeks, and the worry is they will get to a 1 p.m. game and try to do more than they should. Instead of having one or two bullpens and three or four batting practices, they will have one or two of each. We will preach, preach, preach to stay within yourself. Just give us what we got and don't reach for extra. You know though that when you get to the season and the lights go on for real, that's the scariest part.
"You will have to individualize the training as much as necessary. Our plan is to be flexible with each guy and go with what we see. The other side is we saw some areas of strength and others that needed to be improved. So we will get right after that. We will try to maintain the strengths and improve the areas that were not good enough."
Bruce Levine covers the Cubs and White Sox for 670 The Score. Follow him on Twitter @MLBBruceLevine.
