During his two shutout innings in the Mets’ intrasquad game today, R.A. Dickey threw a couple of his extra-slow knuckleballs, drawing “oohs” and “ahhs” from the crowd.

After the game, Dickey cited the velocity readings on the Digital Domain Park on his fastballs and said he needed to be conscious of building up his arm strength before Opening Day. He said he’d like his fastball to sit between 80 and 85 mph, and it seemed like it was generally topping out around 80 today, though — and as Dickey noted — it’s hard to put too much stock in one stadium’s radar (it’s Spring Training for the scoreboards, too).

As for the slow ones, Dickey said he threw two of them intentionally, and that he wants the slow knuckler in the low 60s. He noted that he threw a 57 mph pitch in 2011 — the slowest pitch in baseball last year.

“But that’s too slow,” he said. “When it’s that slow, the hitter has time to see it and adjust.”

Dickey added that while he’s not a flamethrower, he generally stays conscious of the velocities on his pitches.

I’ve got some longer things that I’m working on, but they require quotes from a bunch of people that I haven’t been quite able to track down. So for now, more quick hits. I swear I’ll have more cohesive things soon:

– I had previously reported that Chuck James has a sweet beard, but it turns out that I mistook Garrett Olson for James, and Olson is the one with the sweet beard. Chuck James also has a beard, but it is less sweet. Adjust your depth charts accordingly.

– Wilmer Flores played DH for the intrasquad game, but I’ve seen him working at both second and third in camp. He spent some time working one-on-one with a coach this morning on a series of drills that seemed aimed to improve his hands.

– I’m obviously no scout, but Mike Baxter has a nice arm in right. Also, he has better Minor League numbers than fellow lefty-hitting bench candidate Adam Loewen. I’d guess the best case to be made for Loewen is the one I’ve made here: That Loewen is still improving since becoming a full-time position player. But obviously that battle has a lot of time to play out, and it seems like the type of spot that the Mets might easily try to fill with a guy who gets cut elsewhere.

– Baxter made a diving catch in right while I was writing that last note.

– Cesar Puello walked twice in his first three plate appearances in the intrasquad game. He walked 18 times in 488 plate appearances in St. Lucie in 2011.

– I’m pretty sure I heard Ike Davis refer to Ruben Tejada as “El Niño” during a drill. I will never hear that without thinking of this:

In a YouTube interview, Valentine says he invented the wrap in 1980 when the toaster at his restaurant was broken and a regular customer ordered a club sandwich for five straight days. In this version of the story, Valentine claims that after five days of trying to make the toaster work, he offered the man a club sandwich wrapped in tortilla, cut into thirds with melted cheese on top. “And from that day on,” he says, “they called it a wrap.”

But in an interview with Ken Hoffman of the Houston Chronicle in 2010, Valentine says he invented the wrap “a few years” after he first opened the restaurant in Stamford in 1980. He again cites the broken toaster, but there’s no mention of the five-day lag for inspiration. And this time, Valentine says, “In the mid-’90s, the Food Network was visiting our restaurant and my manager called the Club Mex a ‘Wrap.’ The name stuck.”

– Me, here, Nov. 30, 2011.

This website has already established that venerable baseball manager and culinary pioneer Bobby Valentine is guilty of either misremembering or slightly misstating the details of his purported invention of the wrap sandwich. By both accounts, he invented it because a regular customer wanted a club sandwich and the restaurant’s toaster was broken. But the details of the story vary.

Now, via Bill Pennington of the N.Y. Times, comes yet another version of the story. Check it out:

“I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was 1982. I had been buying $4 toasters from Caldor. I wouldn’t buy an expensive toaster because we didn’t have that much money and there was only one menu item involving toast: a club sandwich. But the banker who loaned us money came in for lunch often and he always wanted a club sandwich on toast.

“So the banker comes in one day and the toaster is broken. In fact, it broke and we had thrown it out. The waitress comes into the kitchen with a long face wondering what we’re going to do because the banker wants his club sandwich. Well, we had just put nachos on the menu and we were ordering tortillas from Phoenix, too.

“I was cooking and I looked over at the tortillas that were sitting there. I grabbed one and put all the ingredients of a club sandwich into the tortilla. I rolled it up and I melted a little cheese on the top to keep the tortilla from opening up. And I said: ‘Tell him, we don’t have club sandwiches today but this is a club Mex.’

“And he ate it and liked it. A few weeks later, my manager goes on a local food-network program and they ask if we have invented anything unique at the restaurant. And he says: ‘Yeah, we have a club sandwich that we wrap. Bobby made it up.’

Again we have the regular customer requesting a club sandwich and a broken toaster. But note: Valentine claims to “remember it like it was yesterday,” but this time it’s definitely 1982 — not 1980 — and there’s no mention of the five straight days in which the banker ordered his club sandwich. Also, this time the it’s a “local food-network program” that came and visited and not the Food Network, and this time it’s only a few weeks after the invention of the wrap, not the mid-90s.

To Valentine’s credit, the human memory is a strange thing and the events in question happened at least 30 years ago. Plus, every decent storyteller will tell you there are always minor details that get emphasized and exaggerated with time for the sake of improving the story.

If Bobby Valentine wants to say now that he remembers it like it was yesterday, that it was definitely 1982 and that it was a local food program that helped establish the name “wrap,” let’s just take him at his word. This is the man that brought the fake mustache to the Major League dugout. I’ll allow him some embellishments here and there.

Via @DanDotLewis.