Bowa's arrival gives Dodgers a wake-up call

VERO BEACH, Fla. -- No! No! No!

It's 10 a.m., and Larry Bowa is working on four hours' sleep.

How old are you! How can you be tired? How?

It's batting practice for everyone else, but winning practice for kids Andy LaRoche and Chin-lung Hu.

Hu! You can't be tired, are you kidding me!

Bowa is engaging in the time-honored act of yawning coaches hitting infielders lazy grounders.

Except they're not lazy, they're incessant. And they're not grounders, they're earth-scorchers.

And Bowa is not yawning. He shows up for work every morning before 7, yet the Dodgers have yet to see him yawn.

What do I want you to do? I want you to catch it! How's that? Just catch it!

Hu and LaRoche catch it, but no, Bowa wants more, he always wants more.

He wants it caught with energy. He wants it caught with accountability. And you better make the doggone throw.

That's an E-6! That throw is an E-6! C'mon, you can't be tired!

He's 62, he hasn't caught a ground ball in more than 20 years, yet the new Dodgers third base coach has spent this spring spraying around the sort of knowledge and intensity that makes him their second-most important off-season acquisition.

How can Joe Torre sit in the dugout so coolly?

Because, where he once had Don Zimmer, now he has Larry Bowa.

"Fire and ice," Torre says.

If Torre is that graceful duck gliding across summer, Bowa is the furious one paddling underneath.

"We're connected at the hip," Torre says.

If Torre is the fatherly schoolhouse administrator, Bowa is the vice principal with a paddle.

"The way I do it, you want someone in there who will always speak their mind, call it like they see it, and that's Larry," Torre says. "Once the players understand him, and see that nobody cares about them more than he does, it will start to have an effect on them."

Torre saw it during their two years together with the Yankees. The baseball world has seen it during Bowa's 43 years in the game, as he rose from an undrafted free agent to own the best career fielding percentage (.980) of any shortstop in National League history.

In five full years as a manager in San Diego and Philadelphia, he had two losing seasons. He has since become one of the game's most coveted third base coaches because he can say what a manager cannot.

"I believe in work ethics, no short cuts," he says. "Guys get to the big leagues, make a lot of money, and don't understand that there is still a price to pay."