In your last start, the biggest game of your life, you pitched 7 2/3 shutout innings in Game 5 of the World Series. In the previous two rounds of the postseason you pitched well in both of your starts, winning one game and yielding just two hits over seven innings in the other.

You closed the regular season as an integral part of the rotation, winning twice and allowing just two earned runs in 19 innings. You arrived in spring training employed by a team with just two lock starters.

	Miguel Batista Pitcher Arizona Diamondbacks Profile
	2001 SEASON STATISTICS GM W-L IP H K ERA 48 11-8 139.1 113 90 3.36

And before camp even starts you're assigned to the bullpen.

You complain, right? You punch 1 on your speed-dial, harangue your agent and demand to be traded, released, or otherwise hyperspaced out of town.

But you're not Miguel Batista.

For all of Batista's success with the Arizona Diamondbacks last season, particularly late in the year when the club needed someone -- anyone -- to give the rotation more depth than your average kiddie pool, the right-hander has accepted his somewhat amorphous relief role with shocking serenity. Manager Bob Brenly has already decided that his rotation will stack up as Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, Todd Stottlemyre, Rick Helling and Brian Anderson. Batista will go back to the bullpen with only one thing clear -- he'll never really be clear as to what his role is.

"I've been telling people, they're forgetting the real principle of what we're hired to do," says Batista, 31, an amateur poet who sounds like one. "You never see players hired to start 35 games or hit 70 home runs. They're hired to help the team win. And in my case, I'm the only one who can do the job ... that leaves the team options. I told them, there can't be too many generals. I do what I'm told to do, and I do it happily."

No, your contacts haven't clouded up. Batista is serious.

Most people thought that after his pressure performances last year Batista would become this season's No. 3 starter after Johnson and Schilling. (Van Lingle Mungo could have vied for the spot if not for the small complication of his having been dead for 17 years.) But Stottlemyre, whose health has had a chameleon's consistency, has pitched well in his first few spring-training starts, and Brenly declared that if only for his persistence the veteran has a rotation spot until he loses it. Helling was signed as a free agent -- after the club first went after David Wells and Kevin Tapani -- with the hope that mechanical adjustments he made after a dreadful start last year have permantly restored his velocity.

And Brenly prefers to keep Anderson as the fifth starter/swingman. So Batista goes to the pen. Statistically, it would be fair to call this one a toss-up. Batista's ERA last season as a starter was 3.36, as a reliever 3.35. He gave up fewer baserunners per nine innings as a reliever (11.4 to 10.7), but that slight difference was probably a function of his entering the game to face specific favorable matchups.

Brenly didn't make the decision sound difficult. "Miggy'll do a little bit of everything," the second-year manager says. "He can be a long guy in case our starter gets blown out early in the game. He can set up.

"Helling's a starter. Stottlemyre, given his medical history, has to stay on a schedule of every fifth day. Brian Anderson gives us another lefty and can go to the bullpen if he's skipped and not suffer. Given the personnel we have, that's the way we like it the best."

It's fair to say that Batista will have at least a few GS's this year. Stottlemyre's right shoulder is hanging by the thread of his thoracic nerve. While they don't pitch like it, Johnson and Schilling are a combined 73 years old and someday -- really, it has to happen sometime -- their bodies will notice. And while Anderson has started most of his career, he did post a 5.46 ERA as a starter last year compared to his giving up just two runs and 10 baserunners in 9 2/3 relief innings.

"Personally, I like relieving because I don't have to wait four days to pitch again," says Batista, who doesn't rattle easily. Asked by the Mesa Tribune earlier this spring about his role, the Dominican philosophized by saying, "You put the saddle on the horse heading somewhere, but only God knows where you're going to end up." He approached his World Series start against the Yankees last year with the calmness of a guy who plays the quena, a South American flute-like instrument, in his spare time.

"People expected them to kill me," he says. "But I'm not an American. I'm not impressed by the Yankees' history. I'm not impressed by Yankee Stadium. That ballpark doesn't mean anything to me."

Nor does the seeming snub of being sent to the bullpen after all he did last year. "He's in a tough spot," says teammate Luis Gonzalez, "but he's willing to do what he's asked to do."

For Miguel Batista, poet and pragmatist, the speed-dial can wait.

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