Jason Kendall doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to hear about how his throbbing thumb made it almost impossible to hit last season, when his average sank from .320 to .266. He doesn't want to hear how the pain of having split-fingers and foul tips slam into his glove hand made it worse and worse every night. He doesn't want to hear any excuses, and even less make them.

"I had a s--- year," he says. "If I was healthy enough to go out there, I was healthy enough to get a hit. I didn't."

	Jason Kendall had a miserable offensive season last year as he hit just 10 home runs.

No, he didn't. Kendall's .266 average was 48 points below his career .314 mark heading into last season, and he hit just 10 home runs with 53 RBI. This in spite of playing a career-high 157 games. He morphed from Kendall to Karkovice almost overnight. Then again, when you played almost every day despite an ulnar collateral ligament in your thumb that required surgery about 10 minutes after the season ended -- a season that saw your team play its last meaningful game sometime around early May -- you could be forgiven a slip in performance.

But Kendall isn't the forgiving type, at least toward himself. "No excuses," he says, shaking his head as defiantly as a kid avoiding cough medicine.

A quick glance at his left hand reveals a long, pink, thick scar up the side of it, where a tendon from his wrist was transplanted to reconstruct the damaged ligament. "Bionic," he jokes. Now that Kendall batted .358 this spring and has shown nothing more than normal catcher soreness, Pirates manager Lloyd McClendon expects the real Jason Kendall to return in 2002, and holds even more respect for his uniform-filthying play.

"We lost 100 games -- I can't imagine what it would have been like without him in there. It could have gotten a lot uglier," McClendon says of Kendall, who had two hits and two runs in the Pirates' 5-3 victory over the Mets on Wednesday. "He could have easily walked away, said the hell with it, and left everyone else holding the bag. He didn't. He stayed there and faced the music with the rest of us."

Kendall didn't hurt the thumb by getting hit while batting, which he does with alarming regularity, but by getting crossed up behind the plate. During the first week of the season, he expected an offspeed pitch and got a fastball that crashed into this thumb and twistingly jammed it. While his deteriorating play signaled that something was wrong, he didn't totally come clean with the injury until late in the season.

By that time, for a catcher who already hurt so much when he woke up that he would keep his alarm clock 20 feet from his bed to force him to get up, the season had already been a nightmare.

"I'm not even sure that guys on the team knew there were times he couldn't even grip the bat up there," his backup, Keith Osik, says. "People think he has to get back on track. To even hit what he did is amazing."

Though Kendall doesn't think it was an issue, McClendon cites PNC Park's deep left-field dimensions as messing with his swing, because as Kendall began to press and try to pull more than he used to balls wouldn't carry out. "He'll be back using the whole field this year," McClendon says. If anything, Kendall's move away from the Three Rivers Stadium turf hurt him: Adept at shooting balls into the gaps at the old park, over the past five years Kendall has just 62 doubles and triples combined on grass, compared to 103 on turf in slightly fewer at-bats.

	Taking a Tumble
	Jason Kendall's stats in the first six years of his career:
	Year	G	R	HR	RBI	Avg.
	1996	130	54	3	42	.300
	1997	144	71	8	49	.294
	1998	149	95	12	75	.327
	1999*	78	61	8	41	.332
	2000	152	112	14	58	.320
	2001	157	84	10	53	.266
	* Dislocated his right ankle in early July and missed the remainder of the year.

McClendon has moved Kendall into the lineup's No. 2 hole, after batting him fifth most of the spring, but one place his catcher won't be moved is to another position. Last season Kendall started in left field 18 times and right field nine times, with one club official saying he would move to second base this year permanently after no professional games at the position. "It's a done deal," the executive last May said, calling Kendall "the best infielder we have right now."

But perhaps because the team realized Kendall wasn't a $10 million second baseman, and certainly because center fielder Adrian Brown has returned from injury (shifting Brian Giles back to left), Armando Rios and Craig Wilson are platooning in right and Pokey Reese has been signed to play second, thoughts of Kendall moving are on hold for this year.

"Jason's going to catch," McClendon says. "Relative to the additions we've made on the ballclub, and some of the injured players coming back, we won't be asking for Jason to do other things."

No, all Kendall will have to do is suffer only the normal trials of catching every day -- the follow-throughs that sklonk you in the skull, the curveballs off the plate that careen into your throat, the gravelly knees that announce themselves when you bend down for the Rice Chex in Aisle 6. Mike Piazza certainly can tell you about those things. A Wilton Guerrero foul tip once cracked his cup in half, and in 1995 he also suffered a thumb-ligament injury so painful he caught one inning with tears creeping down his face. "It felt like there was an icepick in my hand," Piazza says.

Last year's pain drove home a lesson that made Kendall feel sorry not for himself, necessarily, but for his father, Fred, a major-league catcher throughout the '70s. "When I was real young," Jason says, "he'd come home from a game and I'd jump all over him and beat him up. I'd want a piggy-back ride. He's like, 'Get away from me.'

"I apologize to him. Now I know."

Alan Schwarz is the Senior Writer of Baseball America magazine and a regular contributor to ESPN.com.