he seems to have had only fragmentary employment outside the game

CHICAGO -- Michael Conforto rejoined the New York Mets on Monday after a three-week stint in the minors. He may have returned as the teams primary center fielder.With Yoenis Cespedes expressing a desire to solely play left field for the remainder of the season, manager Terry Collins plans to have Conforto begin taking fly balls in center field.Collins said it makes sense to restrict Cespedes to left field because that is less taxing on his legs than center field. And keeping Cespedes bat in the lineup is the priority. Cespedes returned to the starting lineup on Sunday after an eight-day absence while resting a strained right quadriceps muscle.Were taxing his body pretty heavily by putting him in center field, Collins said. And we need him to hit. We need him to hit, and hit a lot. I just think if hes in left field where hes comfortable, and theres not so much emphasis on the defensive side, that hell go back and do what we hope he can do -- and thats be a big production guy.Conforto said he worked out in center field while at Oregon State, although he appeared in no games at that position in college. He exclusively had played left field as a professional ballplayer until this month, when he started four games in right field with Triple-A Las Vegas.Collins had planned for Conforto to begin seeing action in center field with the Pacific Coast League club on Monday, but general manager Sandy Alderson elected to instead promote Conforto to the majors for the series opener against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. So Confortos center-field acclimation will need to occur on the fly in the majors.Ill be an athlete, Ill go make plays and do whatever I can if they need me out there, Conforto said.Assuming he shows any aptitude, Conforto could begin handling center field against right-handed pitching -- flanked by Cespedes and Curtis Granderson -- as soon as the weekend at Marlins Park. Collins said his preference is not to use the 35-year-old Granderson in center field. Granderson has started 1,075 games at that position, but he has not been a full-time center fielder since 2012 with the New York Yankees.I think thats asking a lot, Collins said.Juan Lagares will continue to start in center field against left-handed pitching, as is the case Monday night against Chicago Cubs southpaw Jon Lester. Lagares may see some time in center field against right-handers, but Conforto did not return to the majors to sit, so those opportunities for Lagares should be limited.Because Wrigley Field has a relatively compact outfield and Conforto had no time to tune up, Collins initially planned to have Cespedes start Tuesday in center field against the Cubs. But after Cespedes patrolled left field conservatively in Mondays series opener, Collins huddled with outfield coach Tom Goodwin postgame and the manager indicated he may just leave Cespedes in the corner. Regardless, Cespedes will not remain in center field once the Mets move on to Miami for their next series, Collins pledged.Meanwhile, Conforto returns to the Mets with more confidence at the plate.Rookie outfielder Brandon Nimmo was demoted to clear the roster spot for Conforto, who hit .344 with three homers and 15 RBIs in 61 Triple-A at-bats. Conforto had been in an 8-for-75 rut before his June 25 demotion.I think there was a period of obviously being upset, Conforto said about the demotion. Youve got to go through that. ... Looking back on it, I think I got a little pull-happy. I think that was pretty clear. I think I really wanted to cover that inside corner, which was a spot I was having trouble with. And I think that took over a little bit. I didnt realize that would take away from my ability to go the other way. But I think it did a little bit.I just worked on trying to stay through the ball, worked on using my lower half a little bit better, getting my weight shifted a little bit further back just to start in my stance. I was kind of front-heavy there for a little bit. So when I went down, that was the first thing that the guys down there said. Mikal Bridges Jersey . Tuesdays surgery at Atlantas Piedmont Hospital was performed by Dr. Xavier Duralde and Hawks team physician Dr. Michael Bernot. Tyler Johnson Jersey . Deulofeu injured a muscle in his right leg in Evertons 4-1 win over Fulham in the English Premier League on Saturday. Barcelona says that its team doctors will "co-ordinate" with Evertons medical staff as Deulofeu recovers. https://www.thesunslockerroom.com/Dan-Majerle-City-Edition-Jersey/ . Brad Jacobs and his Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., team took control of the game early. Ty Jerome Suns Jersey . The 26-year-old Ireland striker, who has four goals this season, has signed a three-and-a-half year contract with his new club. Steve Nash Suns Jersey . Goals from Jerome Boateng, Franck Ribery and Thomas Mueller extended Bayerns unbeaten run to a record 37 matches. "This record is incredible," Bayern coach Pep Guardiola said. Charles Bannerman is known today by a feat and an image. The feat, of course, is that of having faced Test crickets first ball and scored its first run and peeling off its maiden century, a match-winning 165 from an Australian all-out score of 245 at the MCG in March 1877. The image is a widely published photograph taken nearly 53 years later of an elderly Bannerman, in hat and coat, laying a gently approving hand on the shoulder of Donald Bradman at the SCG, when the 21-year-old was about to commence his near-vertical ascent through crickets hierarchy of records.The time lapse between feat and image is perhaps just as evocative. Bannermans cricket peak was brief and lonely: you can almost argue that it was confined to that innings, when he took toll of an English bowling attack still queasy from a stormy crossing of the Tasman, for it was almost exactly twice his next best first-class score, and he played only two further Test matches. But a record is one thing, a first another. A record can be broken; a first can never be busted to second. Bannermans feat afforded him such imperishable status that he could, as it were, induct Bradman in an Australian batting lineage, with the additional prophecy: This boy will clip all the records.The big gap is also an enigma, both enticing and off-putting to a potential biographer. Bannerman has probably waited as long as any cricketer for a historian to go searching for him, and Alf James, a studious classicist, reveals the pressure of the years in Australias Premier Batsman.The traces are scant, limited and ambiguous. There are no photographs of Bannerman in action. The written accounts of his batting are disappointingly short of detail. James deems him a pioneer of forward play, but a mental image of his batting is hard to summon. Likewise a personal image. When James quotes a fond 1923 memoir of Bannerman from the journalist Jack Worrall - May he long remain with us, with his big blue eyes and his lisp - the intimacy of the observation is powerful because it is so exceptional. Otherwise James has been left to recite a lot of scores, including some lengthy threadbare sequences, which seem a little redundant seeing that they are recapitulated in statistical appendices.Yet there is something here, and if the writing is mainly serviceable, with the occasional Latinate flourish, an intriguing story is at least hinted at.Born in Woolwich, Bannerman was two years old when his family arrived in Sydney, his mother heavily pregnant with his brother Alick, himself destined to play 28 Tests. Their father worked at Sydneys mint, whose deputy master was an accomplished round-arm bowler. The boys walked in, then, on an evolving game.It was also the unruly game of an unruly people, and Charles Bannerman was no exception. James reveals that 19-year-old Bannerman lost his own mint job for insolence to his superior officer and general insubordination, and went through a period in his early twenties when he alienated many contemporaries by his cocky club- and colony-hopping. The colt was considered a bright particular star while he lasted, said a censorious columnist in the Sydney Mail in March 1874, but a good many people have come to the conclusion that for some time he has been on the wane, and that if common sense does not come to his aid he will be snuffed out forever.David Warner, then, has a distinguished anntecedent.dddddddddddd Although not even Warner had three children with his first wife and two children with a mistress ten years his junior.Bannermans crowded hour of glorious batting life came when he was 25. After the subsequent Australian tour of England, he dropped away precipitously, in a way strangely foretold. And although James has been unable to establish any satisfactory explanation, writers seemed uncannily aware that the process was irreversible. By 1879, the Sydney Morning Herald was calling him only the ghost of himself, Australian Town and Country Journal only the ghost of the player we used to know, and the Sydney Mail was asserting that there was no prospect of improvement.Whatever they meant, they were right. For the next five years, Bannerman averaged less than 15 in first-class cricket. Drink and gambling, it is reputed, was his downfall, wrote a contemporary many years later, although James shies from this far-fetched conclusion on the slight evidence available. James being a reluctant interpreter, the reader is left in a way to build their own story. My own was this. Bannerman was unusual in his Australian era in playing openly as a professional. After losing his mint job, he seems to have had only fragmentary employment outside the game. Instead he relied on playing, touring, coaching and umpiring. His only other fallback, bookmaking, was a constraint. Not only did it eat into his Saturdays, but the England team of 1882-83 refused to accept him as an umpire - not surprising, really, given the betting-related cricket riot at the SCG four years earlier.Bannerman was a professional, in other words, long before there was anything like a professional cricket structure. And for it he, and others, paid a price. Probably the most moving passages in James book are from a news story in Sydneys Evening News, May 27, 1891, headlined A Cricketer in Low Circumstances: Bannerman had been arraigned to answer charges of desertion of his wife, and failure to provide for her. An exchange is recorded:Judge: Your family is in destitute circumstances. How do you get your living? Bannerman: By cricketing, your Worship. Judge: But its the off season now, and theres not much doing in that line. Bannerman: Ive nothing to say against my wife, your worship, at all. If you will give me a week to try and get the money, I might get some of it. By cricketing, your Worship: four desperate words to encapsulate the precariousness of the professional cricket life, for the player and for their financial dependents. Blessedly it was not to be the end. Cricket biography reserves a special place for the tragic figure. Bannerman ends up being a rarer figure in biography - a subject who flirted with tragedy and survived. When his wife died in 1895, he was able to marry his mistress, and he benefited by testimonial matches in 1899 and 1922; his prudent brother, meanwhile, grew wealthy.In that 1930 photograph with bashful Bradman, Bannerman strikes a pose of solemn dignity befitting the prestige of his achievement - with maybe just a hint of the character he had been in his playing days. For is that a cigarette in his hand?Charles Bannerman: Australias Premier Batsman By Alf James The Cricket Publishing Company 146pages, $41.80 ' ' '