Dave Hansen and the Ides of March

People who actually went to Mariners games in 2004 and 2005 -- and I realize there aren't many of them -- may remember how we had Dave Hansen as a lefty bench bat for a while there.

Dave Hansen spent most of his career as a backup 3B-1B type, and one of the best pinch-hitters in the history of baseball, but by the time he got to the Mariners he was mostly done for, and in 2005 we saw him strike out a lot more often than we saw him pinch-hit home runs.

However, his legacy to me was that his at-bat music was "Vehicle", by the Ides of March, which I thought was super-cool. Today, being as it is the Ides of March, I was thinking about Dave Hansen and wondering where he is now.

It appears that he actually retired after the 2005 season when he couldn't get a contract for the 2006 season, but I'm not sure anybody actually noticed. For the 2007 season, he's signed on with the Mobile Bay Bears as a hitting coach. The Bears are the new Diamondbacks AA affiliate, as part of the Southern League Shuffle this year; ironically, they used to be a Padres affiliate, which would have been a lot more appropriate for a former Padres and Mariners player to be coaching with.

And speaking of the Padres, one might also recall that Dave Hansen was not only part of the trade that sent Jeff Cirillo *out* of Seattle, but was later traded back to the Padres for Jon Huber. We like Jon Huber. We dislike Jeff Cirillo. We won't bring up the fact that the Cirillo trade also brought us The Laziest Man In Baseball and Kevin Jarvis, and we sent Brian Sweeney to the Padres.

In semi-related news, Brian Sweeney is now pitching for the Nippon Ham Fighters, which is good, except he also just got owned by Lotte to the tune of 8 runs in 4 1/3 innings yesterday (on their Ides of March). Alas. However, last time he faced Lotte on March 3rd he threw 4 innings of one-hit ball, and he shut out Hanshin for 5 innings on March 9th. In general he's been doing pretty well over there, though.

In completely unrelated news, CJ Nitkowski, who's been keeping a really good daily blog of his experiences in Japan, mentioned that Adam Hyzdu got sent down to the Hawks' minor league team. That's kind of harsh, but not entirely unexpected, I guess.

I don't feel like talking about the Seibu prospect-bribing scandal, by the way, which is why I haven't. The only good part about it all is that maybe the already-retardedly-complex-and-flawed draft system will get reworked this year.

(EDIT> Also, Bowie Kuhn died.)