TEMPE, Ariz. – Born in the imagination of a minor-league pitching coach, carried from Class A to the brink of the big leagues by an over-achieving, side-arming right-hander, "The 3-2" is a pick-off move that is challenging umpires at least as much as it is eliminating baserunners.

Footage of the move, captured accidentally Friday night by a Venezuelan film crew stationed behind home plate at Surprise Stadium, has been carried on compact disc from Arizona to the Major League Baseball offices in New York City. Duplicates will go out to umpiring supervisors and trickle into the minor leagues.

The pickoff play begins with the bases loaded or runners at second and third. The pitcher fakes the throw to third, then allows that momentum to carry him – 270 degrees counter-clockwise – into a throw to second base. It works best with the bases loaded, when it comes disguised as the more familiar third-to-first pickoff.

Matt Wilhite, a 25-year-old reliever who has spent the past three full seasons

PHOENIX – Technically it still was Monday morning in Maryvale (though the sun was in mid-afternoon form) and Eric Gagne, off elbow and back surgeries, was on the mound and pitching well into the 90s.

That would be to Cole Gillespie, currently wearing No. 96 for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Followed by Brad Nelson, wearing No. 98.

The fastball – that was closer to 88, 89.

It's the nature of spring training's "B" games, the temperatures and uniform numbers running a little hotter than the fastballs.

And that's about where Gagne stands, now more than two years removed from those three glorious seasons in Los Angeles, where his furry mug and blazing fastball became iconic figures in a city of icons.

On a one-year contract with the Texas Rangers that came with daily appointments with the team trainer and a strength coach, Gagne pitched to his first three batters of spring Monday.

He trotted in from the left-field bullpen for the fourth inning not to the sounds of full-throated hysteria and

SURPRISE, Ariz. – We can't really be sure where Sammy Sosa was for the past year and a half.

But, we know where he's been.

He left baseball a grim man, tortured by a slow bat, tactical confusion and immovable pride, the gathering symptoms of the hitter's mortality. He was 36, pushed by age and deteriorating reflexes into the far corner of the batters' box, and still unable to defend his strike zone. He was damaged and beaten.

His career lived and, we thought, died in the fumes of the game's noxious underground, then swept away with those accused but not charged, those presumed guilty but not tagged.

It was just as well. His skills were gone. He'd done what he'd come to do, to rush the great single-season home-run record and close in on 600 career home runs and make tens of millions of dollars for it. He did not leave a hero, not to most, to whom it was simply good enough that he'd thrilled them for a short period and then left quietly.

Now here he is, back in the on-deck circle,

TEMPE, Ariz. – Gary Matthews Jr. should probably know that while he fields calls from his attorneys and plots strategies with his crisis management firm, the Los Angeles Angels are beginning to field their own calls and plot their own strategies.

Very soon, they'll have a season to play. And they'll need a leadoff hitter and a center fielder.

Maybe that'll be Matthews, which, one would have thought, was the least he could do in the early weeks of his $50 million contract.

But, as Matthews abides by his tactic of keeping his new ballclub from the truth about his alleged receipt of human growth hormone 2 ½ years ago and ignoring its pleas for a public explanation, his new ballclub is charting its own plan, including, according to one club source, the possibility of acquiring a replacement center fielder.

The ground here is relatively new for Major League Baseball and the moving target that is its Steroid Era, but league sources say Commissioner Bud Selig is considering whether there are

MESA, Ariz. – For Jake Peavy, the next few months will be spent in the same manner as the last few, covering the narrow and thorny ground between good and great.

He's crossed it before, twice before, both on his way to becoming one of the dominating pitchers in the game and then, in an oddly inconsistent 2006, on his way back.

So, the footsteps he traces are his own, the fastball he aims to the inside corner has been just there before, the results of it all have been his to summon.

"I feel like I've grown," he said, "like I've learned a lot in that time."

Peavy took the ball Friday afternoon for his third spring start for the San Diego Padres. Three weeks from his sixth big-league season, he remains the youngest pitcher in their rotation, at 25. Granted, his prospects for that improved when the Padres signed Greg Maddux and David Wells. Yet it holds that he may not have reached his prime production years and already has led the National League in strikeouts once (2005) and ERA once

FORT MYERS, Fla. – Really, I'd half expected Daisuke Matsuzaka to release his first pitch with a thunderbolt, turning the batter into a smoldering pile of cinder, the umpire raising his right hand, unsure.

"Uh, strike?"

By the end of the first inning, catcher Jason Varitek would have the raccoon-ish soot mask of a coal miner and later Terry Francona would say he thought Matsuzaka threw "free and easy and he'll probably be ready for 40 pitches next time out. And sorry about the incineration thing."

Instead, on a muggy Friday night at City of Palms Park, Matsuzaka lifted his red glove over his head, uncoiled from his deliberate windup, threw his first semi-official pitch for the Boston Red Sox and … a management school student and punter from Boston College hit it down the left-field line for a double.

To be fair, Johnny Ayers was probably looking gyroball.

Matsuzaka, who cost the Red Sox $103.1 million in posting fees and salary, threw 25 pitches over two innings in his spring debut, 19

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Delmon Young spent most of his life standing in the center of a baseball universe, everyone watching and waiting for him to do something great.

Which can't be easy.

Then he spent a few months standing in the same place, everyone watching and waiting for him to screw up again.

Which has to be worse.

Young shook his head.

"Neither," he said, was more trying than the other. In such a universe, fame and infamy are a push.

"I faced the most possible media scrutiny you could face besides Barry Bonds," he said. "So this, fans heckling me, whatever, really doesn't bother me. I know if I take a hat trick, they're going to let me know."

His eyes are wary, but his handshake is firm and hospitable. Around him, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' temporary clubhouse is clearing out, Young's teammates leaving behind a few stray pizza boxes and the last of their early-spring aches.

Before they know it, the Devil Rays will be Young's team. Maybe not this season, but one soon after. He'll

VERO BEACH, Fla. – Tommy Lasorda awoke Wednesday morning in the Dodgertown room he's occupied for going on 30 springs.

He had breakfast in the same cafeteria, at the same round table with the "Reserved for Tommy Lasorda" placard in the middle, this morning joined by three Los Angeles Dodgers officials.

He umpired a few innings on a minor-league diamond, part arbiter, part instructor, part bluster.

"It was," he said, "constructive."

Just before 11 a.m., he steered his golf cart past the practice fields, where Nomar Garciaparra and Jeff Kent were taking some of the early swings of spring. He stopped to sign autographs and pose for pictures, playing it gruff, but he couldn't stop a subtle grin when he'd harangued a teenager into a "Please, Mr. Lasorda? I said, 'Puh-leeze.' "

Arriving at charming Holman Stadium for an intrasquad game, he chose a flip-down chair in a shady spot seven rows behind home plate.

Dressed in a Dodgers windbreaker, navy blue sweatpants and new white sneakers,