Welcome to Spring Training

Today is the first day that Dodger pitchers and catchers report to spring training at Camelback Ranch, officially kicking off the 2010 baseball campaign.  You can smell the excitement in the air.

Dodger VP of Communications Josh Rawitch reports that Eric Gagne is in camp wearing his old number 38, leaving Ramon Troncoso to switch to 67, at least for the spring.

Steve Dilbeck of the Los Angeles Times' Dodger blog had a nice story yesterday about the dwindling number of full-time traveling beat reporters covering the Dodgers, focusing on Dylan Hernandez and Ken Gurnick:

Only Hernandez and Gurnick, who was previously a Dodgers beat writer for several area newspapers, now cover the team on a daily basis. This season Tony Jackson, formerly of the Daily News, will cover home games for ESPN.com/Los Angeles and make selected road trips.

In the age of Twitter, following spring training is easier than ever before, as many reporters use Twitter as an outlet for short bursts of information, in addition to breaking news.  In the last 24 hours, via Twitter, we found out:

• Jamey Carroll, Reed Johnson, Xavier Paul, Chin-Lung Hu, and "a beardless Casey Blake" are among the position players reporting early (via Hernandez -- @dylanohernandez on Twitter).  Rawitch also mentioned Jason Repko and Ivan DeJesus are in camp too.
• Manny Ramirez actually came to camp Friday (via Gurnick -- @kengurnick)
• Casey Blake offered his opinion on the Phillies: "I have a lot of respect for Halladay, but I don't feel they got a ton better because they lost Cliff [Lee]." (via Jeff Fletcher of AOL -- @JeffFletcherAOL)
• Juan Castro reported to Phillies camp still with his Dodger equipment bag, saying "I gotta figure out what to do with it." (via Matt Gelb on the Philadelphia Inquirer -- @magelb)
  

You can follow True Blue LA on Twitter as well.  We are @truebluela. 

Do you have plans for spring training? Let us know in the comments.  I will be there from March 18-21.