"Andy and Nomar give us two good options at third base," Colletti said. "We're gonna let them figure it out. I think (Andy) is on the verge of being where (James) Loney and (Matt) Kemp were a year ago, where (Andre) Ethier and (Russell) Martin were two years ago. It's time to give him an opportunity to stick with the club and play as much as he earns."

"I think it's unfair to either player to have any preconceived notions of how it's gonna turn out. There'll be ample opportunity for both. Nomar's got the versatility to play some first base as well. James is gonna need a day off here or there.

"It's probably the first Spring Training where (Andy) has had more than a legitimate chance to make this club. Most of the time a player has to make the club. He's almost gonna have to not make the club. It's a pretty good spot to be in."

Further, LaRoche could very well remain on the team even if he's not in the lineup every day.

"You have to really look at the composition of your roster," Colletti said. "You're gonna need availability as well. I think in LaRoche's case, if he can be productive even part-time, I'd be willing to give him an opportunity to stay. Abreu, due to his versatility in the infield, perhaps the same. … I think both players may have an opportunity to be here less than full-time.

"You try to manage the needs of the club with the player's place and time, too. We need somebody with Abreu's versatility. We need somebody with (Chin-Lung) Hu's versatility – at least one or the other, if not both (though later Colletti downplayed the idea of Abreu and Hu both starting the season in Los Angeles). If Andy can produce power, even if it's once in a while, or if Nomar takes the job, that's okay too."

"That said, if the roster shakes out and he has a great spring and we start the season and he doesn't make the club out of the camp, but he's had a great spring, that doesn't mean he's down in Las Vegas the entire year. As we say every year during the Freeway Series, our roster locked in for a day."

"I struggled pretty bigtime up here at the plate," he said. "We looked back at my swing and it was a completely different swing than what I had in the minor leagues. I think I was trying to prove too much, too quickly. Instead of just staying relaxed, I think I was trying to hit too many home runs, and I was pulling off the ball, and a lot of things like that, instead of just staying relaxed, taking the same approach, just trying to get a line-drive base hit. You know, the home runs will come,"

He added that he has already begun working with new Dodger hitting coach Don Mattingly – a process accelerated by the January minicamp – to get his swing back the way it should be.

Neither Colletti nor LaRoche currently view his back as a concern.

"He seems to be doing fine," Colletti said, "and it's our understanding if he stays in proper condition and works out, it ceases to be any detriment whatsoever."

LaRoche said his back feels "great," and that he needs to do exercises a few times a week, 10 to 15 minutes a day.

"The last time I got hurt during the season, the last time I missed any games because of my back, that's the last time it's hurt me at all," he said. "Coming in, I wasn't sure how taking all these grounders was going to feel last week, but it's been fine."

"It's a Joe Torre question, but it's not out of the realm of possibility," Colletti said.

"I'm fine with the outfield as it is. I like the versatility of it. I like the depth of it. I like the competition of it. Nothing wrong with competition. When you have competition, you have a chance to be a better club. Just like at third base. Let the players decide who's gonna play and how often they're gonna play."

"We'll see how everybody pitches," Colletti said. "If he continues to progress, there's a great chance he'll be ready to go. But there's still a long way to go, and a lot of different tests that he has to pass, so to speak. But we've had nothing to discourage us. He's been throwing a while now. He's throwing off a mound. As of about two weeks ago, he was throwing every other day, on flat ground, about 100 throws a day, and now he's off the mound. Again, not 100 percent throwing, not everything-he's-got throwing, but … continuing to (build) his arm strength."

Conte will visit Schmidt later this month, aiming to smooth his transition to Spring Training.

"We've been really concerned in developing a lot of strength and flexibility at each phase of this," Conte said, "and making sure we don't have any setbacks. We're going to continue to do the same thing — not based on the calendar. As far as where he's going to be in Spring Training, I'll tell you guys the same thing I tell Ned Colletti when he asks me: 'We won't really know what he's going to do the first day of Spring Training until about a week before, depending on how he does the next three or four weeks.' "

Of course, this depends in part on Schmidt being forthcoming about any problems.

"We've told him that if he doesn't tell us, we're gonna beat him with a stick to a pulp," Conte said. "Jason knows exactly what's at stake here. … There's no reason for him to lie to me yet."

Conte has hopes Schmidt will be 100 percent for the season, but it wasn't any kind of guarantee. Conte also didn't want to be pigeonholed as to what "100 percent" meant, other than health – as opposed to quality of performance.

"Hopefully, Kuo's healthy," Colletti said. "We had the same hope a year ago, after how he pitched at the end of the '06 season. He's another one that feels fine right now, but we'll have to wait and see. We could use him. We don't have many left-handed pitchers. Greg Miller's another one, another lefthander that's got a chance to make this club. We're not at appoint yet where we know if we're going to go with 11 or 12 pitchers, but you do the math, we don't have or 11 or 12 that we can lock in today."

Watson also commented positively about Miller, who will be competing for a bullpen job.

"He was healthy all of 2007," Watson said. "We worked on the command. He was in Arizona Fall League, and he's healthy. The velocity was back last year – he was anywhere from 92 to 97 (mph) the entire year. The command was the thing we were really trying to harness through the course of the year."

Watson said the Dodgers do plan to convert 2007 minor-league relief ace Jonathan Meloan to a starting pitching role, and that's how he'll begin the season (one would think in Las Vegas).

"He's not somebody that we're going to delay his arrival," Colletti said. "He'll be here when he's ready. He may be here before he's completely ready, depending on injuries. But there's still some refinement for him, still some of the finer points of the art of pitching that he's still learning. He's not 20 years old yet. But he's got tremendous ability."

Watson seemed open-minded about the idea of promoting young players, be they Kershaw, James McDonald or someone else. One of the purposes of the current minicamp is to prepare for that, by letting the Dodgers become more acquainted with the prospect and by letting the prospect become more acquainted with Los Angeles.

"I think you really need to look at the player," Watson said. "The player's character and makeup, how he handles situations, the amount of innings he's had through the minor leagues to get himself prepared to come and perform at the major league level. His overall tool set and how does it fit and how it will play against some of the better players at the major-league level – against any player at the major league level. There's no league higher than the big leagues.

"As they're progressing through the minor-league system, they start separating themselves. They're showing you their attributes, and what they can or can't do, and our job on the player development side is to close that gap on the things they can't do, so that they are a well-rounded major-league player, whether it be a pitcher or a position player. Getting them comfortable in the environment so that they can have that sense of "I've been here, I've done this before.'

"Can you rush a kid? Sure, some kids can get rushed. But for us, we want to make sure that we've done everything possible to prepare that player for coming to the major leagues, and we wouldn't recommend him to be ready if we didn't think he was ready to come here and handle it – the entire aspects on the field, off the field."

And that includes keeping tabs on the player after his debut, to guide him through the on-field setbacks.

"I try not to (think about it)," said the lefty, who turns 20 on March 19, "but I kind of figure if I have a good start every time I go out, and if I pitch well, then I've got the opportunity to maybe get up here later in the year and help them out. If that happens, that'll be a dream come true for me, and if it doesn't, I'll have next year too. So I'm really not worried about it."

Kershaw had a productive offseason, but didn't work too hard. He said he felt well-rested, noting that he took a month off at the end of the season, then pitched lightly in instructional league. He is eager to improve.

"Next season I'm really going to start working on my changeup, really start trying to perfect that, making it a pitch that I can throw in any count. And really overall just more strikes – I know that's pretty much what every pitcher tries to do, but at the same time, it's really going to help me if I can just attack the zone a little bit more and cut down on my walks."

Kershaw said his control wasn't a mental thing … although the more he talked about it, the more it seemed like a mental thing.

"It's a lot of things pitching-wise, as far as really being aggressive, really not lapsing in any concentration things. You've got to focus on every hitter, and I learned that when I got up to Double-A."

Kershaw said he has benefited from this month's minicamp.

"Marty Reed is the pitching coordinator, and he always works with me. He's always a real big help for me. And it's really good whenever I get to work with him. And (pitching coach) Rick Honeycutt was out here for my first bullpen (session), and that was a great experience for me, just to see what he expects from his pitchers."

Colletti said it was too soon to discuss whether Kershaw could come up in a bullpen role. Kershaw said he had never pitched out of the bullpen, but added that "as long as you can condition your arm to get ready a little faster … I think I could do it."

"Our bench right now on a given day would be a young bench," Colletti said. "We can improve that with a veteran. There's not a team in baseball that wouldn't add another pitcher, so if that opportunity presents itself, we'll follow that as well.

The Dodgers have been talking to free agents Mark Sweeney and Rudy Seanez from the 2007 team, but nothing concrete has developed, and they might move forward without one or both.

Colletti said that Delwyn Young is definitely in consideration to be a key pinch-hitter off the bench, despite his youth. And even though Hu is a longer shot to make the team in April, Colletti had high praise for him.

"Obviously, he played up here last September and did pretty well," Colletti said. "I think he's on the verge of being a big-league player. He may be somebody that is where Andy LaRoche was a year ago, where maybe barring an injury, it may be tougher for him to make the big-league club out of camp. Doesn't mean he won't. He may come in and he may end up beating out Abreu. Tough to say.

"But (Hu) can play both sides of the bag, he's become a stronger player, and he's probably made us think about twice more than anybody lately, and he's also advanced from two years ago to last year probably more than anybody."

"The one thing you can't duplicate at the minor-league level is the pace of the game and the flow of the game," Watson said. "The quality of pitching that they're going to see up here or the players on the other side of the baseball on the defensive end. These guys are all – Abreu, DY, Chin-Lung Hu – they're seem to be ready to play here."

"Delwyn … he's shown that he can hit, and the ability to make adjustments off the bench. Well, the pitchers that he's going to face here, I can't get those guys to perform or play or match up against us every time in Vegas. So for him, he's ready to see (the best). When he came here last year, we looked at his performance at Vegas as well as what he did at the major-league level. He's ready."

"Spring Training for me, instead of a movie, it's almost slide by slide," he said. "Whenever I see a hitter's at-bat, I see how they handle whoever's pitching pitch-to-pitch. Spring Training to me is a lot of chapters, a lot of individual chapters to where a player's at.

"How a young player handles himself in Spring Training really sets the tone for the thought process for a season, because there'll be some players every spring, probably three or four, that have great springs. They're not quite ready to play in the big leagues, or you've got somebody that's more established already playing, but teams go through so many players in the course of a year, the impression a player leaves in Spring Training lasts a long time. … Invariably, the ones who had the solid spring are the ones who come to mind, even if there's somebody in the minor leagues that's perhaps got more experience than they do.

"It gives us all an indication to a lot of things, including their work ethic, including their ability to adjust to a different situation."

We talked a little about players like Wilson Valdez, players whose springs seem to belie their true ability. Colletti acknowledged that in those cases, he's trying to ride the crest of what might be a soon-to-collapse wave.

"You're hoping he's made a leap," Colletti said. "When any player that's in his late 20s and been around a little bit, you have a pretty good idea of who he is, and you think that perhaps he's made a leap. And even if he hasn't made the full complete leap – at this point in the season, at this point in time, he's pretty good and deserves a chance to make a big league club."

By the time the session was ending, the fog was long gone, and I could feel the warm sun on my face full-stop. You can hide, but you can't run. The 2008 season is coming, faster than you know.