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OPENING VOLLEY (IN WHICH WE DISCUSS THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER)
Manny Ramirez has a grill for sale on eBay. It's a good grill, but it only works on those foods it really feels like cooking.

ABREU RETURNS AND THERE IS MUCH REJOICING
Over in the National League East, the Phillies will have as good a chance of winning their division as any team in it — if they can acquire a quality right field bat. They haven't much to trade, so general manager Pat Gillick, who gave the Yankees Bobby Abreu for so little last season, will have to try to acquire his like on the same terms. This is what those of us in the stating-the-obvious biz call "irony."

For the Yankees, the return of Abreu isn't ironic, it's essential. After three weeks nursing a strained right oblique muscle, Abreu finally made his spring debut against the Phillies on Tuesday. In the short term, the injury time out was probably useful for getting Melky Cabrera and the other outfielders on the roster some extra playing time, but as good as those players are, or hope to be, there's nothing like the real thing. Abreu is very much the real thing.

Reviled in Philadelphia because he was perceived to be lackadaisical on defense (and because reviling good players is what they do in Philadelphia — they refused Dick Allen too), Abreu was a significant, season-changing addition for the Yankees last year and should be a key player again this year. He is not Roberto Clemente on defense, but to criticize him for not risking his body by running into the fences (Abreu was criticized in Philly for being shy of the wall) is missing the major benefit of that policy. Since becoming a regular in 1998, Abreu has missed 11, 10, 8, 0, 5, 4, 3, 0, and 7 games in each of the following seasons. A few singles fall in; his bat stays in the lineup. His bat is good enough that any team should be happy to take that tradeoff.

This is a player who has career averages of .302/.412/.507 and is in the lineup every day, and yet he was condemned as lazy and uninterested as a Philly. Nine uninterested and lazy players like that and you'd never lose a game. There may be a mirror somewhere that tells you what it means when a player like that is called "lazy" in spite of his credentials, but there's no telling if anyone ever looks into it or if they understand what they see when they do.

Abreu is one of the most patient hitters in the game, averaging over 100 walks a season. He ranks second to Barry Bonds in walks drawn since 1998 with 980. This gives the Yankees a good chance to have two players in the same lineup take 100 walks for the first time in nearly 70 years. Here's the team's complete list of 100-walk pairs:

As you might guess, those teams scored a lot of runs. All but the 1934 squad led the American League in scoring (they were second to a souped-up, Hank Greenberg-powered Tigers team). The 1930-1932 teams scored over a thousand runs each, though the crazy offensive levels of the time contributed to that. Still, the essence of offense is getting runners on base. The more walks your players take, the fewer outs they make and the more chances their teammates have to bat and drive them in - not to mention the damage done to the opposing starter's pitch count.

Given the quality of the Yankees' lineup, in addition to the damage Abreu and Jason Giambi will do on their own, the Yankees are a cinch to score close to 900 runs. They'd have a good chance at 950 if not for Doug Mientkiewicz, but that's a story for another time.

LIVING IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY
This week's Pinstriped Bible comes to you from Boston, where your host is doing a bookstore appearance. This morning, it was a TV appearance with Christina Kahrl on the local Fox affiliate, a stand-up done outside in the freezing pre-dawn hours, garbage trucks swiping at our sleeves as they rumbled by — for some reason they positioned us in the middle of an intersection. One imagines that if we had said something bad about Daisuke Matsuzaka one of those trucks would have swerved and it would have been bye-bye Bible guy, gone to glory on a fender, as it says on one of the tombstones outside the Haunted Mansion.

I credit Boston with kick-starting the American Revolution, but it's cold here. Happily, on Thursday I'll be back in New York, basking in the warmth of springtime and 26 championship titles. If you care to bask with me, in a wholesome way, I'll be chatting and signing at the Columbia University bookstore starting at 6 p.m. The info:

Columbia University
2920 Broadway
Lerner Hall
New York, NY 10027
212/923-2149

And of course Saturday at 2 p.m., I and a whole bunch of colleagues will be on stage at the wonderful Yogi Berra Museum. If you haven't been there it's a great building dedicated to a unique personality and career. The info for that:

Yogi Berra Musuem
Monclair State University
8 Quarry Road
Little Falls, NJ 07424
973/655-2378

Parenthetically, it's amazing that we live in the greatest country in the world, but our high-speed trains between New York and Boston putter along like a toddler's wind-up toy. Why is it that France, Germany, and Japan get the cool transportation toys? Okay, part of the answer is because we spend all our money protecting those countries and freeing them up to buy choo-choos. Still, it's frustrating.

RESERVE BACKSTOPS MADNESS
Over at MLB.com, Bryan Hoch reports that Raul Chavez has "creeped into consideration." That's not a typo — he said "creeped," not "crept," and maybe that's a comment on Chavez's abilities. We've talked about this before, but of the three non-hitting Yankees catching candidates, Chavez is almost certainly the most impotent. As always, this isn't the most important issue facing the ballclub-few teams have depth at catcher — but it is significant. Jorge Posada will miss at least 20 games this year due to scheduled days off, and the Yankees will play one of the closest things to an automatic out at catcher on those days. Add this to the list of positions (presently one position long) that the Yankees will be looking to upgrade as the season progresses. The key will be to not make any Boston-like Cla Meredith-for-Doug Mirabelli panic moves.

SQUANDERED
The Reds released Paul Wilson today. Phil Hughes, be thankful that you're with the Yankees organization in the 21st century, and not the Mets organization in the 20th. It was very, very important to the Mets in those days that Wilson learn to pitch without the use of a bullpen, and he became an object lesson. In the same way that we don't know how, say, how many doctors who might have cured cancer were removed from the gene pool as a result of the World Wars, it's impossible to know if a Wilson who was handled more carefully would have become an all-time great pitcher, but as Casey Stengel said of Mickey Mantle, he had it in his body to be great. The end of Wilson's story was written long ago, but it's still depressing to see him reach that end.