Happy Sunday. Beautiful here at Bright House - it's 61 degrees at 9:30 in the morning.

Easily the best we've had so far...

Anyway, nothing new to tell about anything going on in the clubhouse. No new faces have arrived.

Monday is the reporting day for the position players, so we should see Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Jayson Werth, Shane Victorino, Raul Ibanez and Greg Dobbs checking in within the next 24 hours.

I've always found Sunday as the best day to kick back and enjoy a good story. I'm sure that's why newspapers are always bigger on Sunday - people like a leisurely day of reading.

On that note, I wrote a story for today's paper on Danys Baez and Jose Contreras, the two Cuban defectors on the Phillies. Their stories of escaping were unbelievable, like something out of one of the Bourne movies.

There was so much I couldn't possibly fit it all into the story in today's paper... so here's a little "web extra," a part that didn't appear in the above linked story:

Danys Baez talked about the 10 days to two-weeks he spent dealing with the fear factor that goes along with defecting from Cuba:

"Every day you wake up, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you that day. At the same time, there were moments. We were driving around and there was a van next to us, a Cuban security on the van. They were parked next to us at a light. And I was like, ‘This is going to get ugly.’ I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I’m not going back, they’re not going to take me back. This is going to get ugly. I knew what they wanted and I wasn’t going to let them take me.

I was in the back of the van. I was ready, prepared to do whatever I had to do to get away. [At this moment in the conversation, Contreras pretends to run in place].

The light turned green and they took off. We went the other way. The Holiday Inn (I stayed at) was six hours from the city."