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Thursday, June 14
From the Clubhouse:
Kim loves his z's

By Alan Schwarz
Special to ESPN.com

After Randy Johnson had struck out 20 Reds on May 8, sure, it was surprising that Byung-Hyun Kim relieved him. The shock was that Kim was awake enough to do so.

The 22-year-old South Korean is known throughout the major leagues for his devastating upshoot slider, but within the Diamondbacks walls he's the kid napping over there. Kim tends to snooze between 12 and 14 hours a day. Because inconveniences like games get in the way occasionally, Kim has been known to slip in a few winks in the clubhouse, the trainer's room, and as soon as the bus shifts out of park. Luis Gonzalez once found him sacked out on a locker-room table and rousted him only with a well-aimed bucket of ice water.


	A rare sight: Byung-Hyun Kim wide awake.

"Where's BK now?" Arizona manager Bob Brenly repeated the other day before Arizona took on the Mets. "He's probably sleeping around here somewhere. He'll snuggle up to a dryer, anything."

In fact, Kim was nowhere on the premises. A half-hour before stretch, he still hadn't arrived. When he finally walked in he claimed he'd been stuck in New York traffic. "Yeah, right," one teammate said.

Fellow reliever Russ Springer claims that Kim has even fallen asleep in the bullpen during games. "We just knock him in the ribs," he said. Greg Swindell, another Diamondback bullpenmate, warned, "You really have to keep an eye on him when he has his Oakleys on."

"I need my sleep -- I always have," explained Kim, who denied ever having dozed in the bullpen. Catcher Damian Miller and others politely disagree, but usually resist the urge to wake Kim too forcefully. The guy is a black belt in tae kwon do.

Before the bigs
Deion Sanders isn't the only Red with some old football stories to tell. Few people remember that Barry Larkin was once an All-American high school defensive back, recruited by powerhouses like Notre Dame and Michigan.

The Wolverines, in fact, kept recruiting Larkin even after he landed on campus strictly to play baseball. Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, who once called Willie Wilson the best prep football player he'd ever seen, just couldn't stop trying to win young Barry's heart.

"He'd come out to our practices and be the only one in the grandstand," Larkin remembers. "It'd be 40 degrees outside, there'd be snow on the ground, and he'd yell, 'Larkin, you big sissy! Come hit a man that can hit you back instead of hitting that sissy baseball!' He'd come down at least twice a week."

A few random observations

People owed e-mails from Billy Wagner shouldn't hold their breath. "My computer's busted," he laments. "My 2-year-old plays video games on it, and when I go away for a few minutes and come back, there are keys missing and all. I come back later and there's peanut butter where the keys used to be. It's hopeless."

How nasty is Roger Clemens' splitter? He threw one about 80 mph to Mel Stottlemyre during a fielding-bunts drill and sawed the bat in half. After almost coughing up a lung laughing, Stottlemyre finished the exercise using just the bat barrel.

Why is Jay Bell rebounding from an off-year last season? Since becoming a full-time player in 1990, the Diamondbacks second baseman has posted an average of .285-19-75 numbers during odd years to just .260-13-60 ones in even years. His explanation? "I'm the Bret Saberhagen of offense."

P2P: Player to Player
Most of the questions major leaguers have commissioned us to ask have been goofy ones, but sometimes young players -- who don't exactly have the cellphones of the stars -- want to find out what makes their heroes so great. Mets utilityman Joe McEwing might never run into Edgar Martinez, so he wanted to know, "He's always so consistent. What is his routine? How does he prepare?"

Martinez: "It's really about doing the same thing every day and taking care of your body. You have to come to the ballpark early and get your work in -- every day. And at my age (38) I've learned that I can't take much time off in the offseason. My rest period after the season is over keeps getting smaller and smaller so I don't lose my swing and my timing. It's maybe two weeks now before I start working out and working on my shape and my stroke for the next season. That's definitely helped me. Joe McEwing is younger than me, though. I'm an old man."

Alan Schwarz is the Senior Writer for Baseball America and a regular contributor to ESPN The Magazine.


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