My favorite underdog Yankee, 37-year-old Jason Giambi, is having a great spring. I couldn’t be happier. Giambi, an eminently likeable guy who is still the only person to have voluntarily apologized for using steroids, is a great hitter and a better first baseman, IMHO, than he gets credit for. I love watching Giambi at the plate; he has one of the great eyes for the strike zone in all of baseball, and almost never swings at a bad pitch. For a power hitter, that’s rare indeed. When Giambi takes a pitch and the umpire calls a strike, the ump is almost always wrong.

He has, as we know, gone through hard times.

“I’ve been in heaven here, and I’ve been in the gutter,” Giambi said.

This sentiment reminds me of (wince) the Pretenders’ lyrics I quoted on my high school yearbook senior page.

Now look at the people
In the streets, in the bars
We are all of us in the gutter
Some of us are looking at the stars

(From “Message of Love,” on Pretenders II, which was underrated when it came out but in fact rocks.)

Coincidence? I think not. Either Jason Giambi is a Pretenders fan, or we both relate to people who have made mistakes, struggled, and tried to come back and live good lives…..

Although if you look at the facial hair…


…perhaps Jason Giambi is, in fact, long-dead Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott!