Sipping A Cup of Major League Coffee

It might not make sense to anybody else, but that doesn't really matter.

Left-hander Tony Sipp, promoted from Class AAA Columbus on Tuesday night, said he felt better walking into a big-league locker room Wednesday with a scar on his left elbow from Tommy John surgery than if he'd done it without having the surgery.

"I had a lot of success early," said Sipp before Wednesday's game against Kansas City. "I'm not saying I'm this type of guy, but I didn't want to come into this clubhouse with a chip on my shoulder. Saying I did this, I did that.

"I've had a lot of time to myself to figure out everything when I was injured. To think about what should happen and how I should get back to where I want it to be."

Sipp remembers lifting five-pound weights at the beginning of his rehab from the 2007 surgery. He was still six months away from picking up a baseball.

"I learned how to deal with a different kind of adversity," said Sipp. "I think that helped a lot. . . . Now I actually have a background to how I got here. It wasn't so easy. It wasn't just success, success, success."

One more human interest story in the game of baseball. Tony Sipp fulfilled his dream last nite, one inning, no hits, one strikeout, and a chance to say for the rest of his life he played in the major leagues.