"The Dodgers walked out of their clubhouse and onto the practice fields Tuesday at Camelback Ranch for their first full-squad workout of the spring with several questions lingering in the background.

How serious are owner Frank McCourt's financial problems? Will this be the year Matt Kemp realizes his potential? Who will play in left field? Does Casey Blake have anything left in the tank?

But the question that could most affect the Dodgers this season might be the one concerning the team's quietest player.

Can closer Jonathan Broxton recover from the worst three-month stretch of his career?

"I'll be fine this year," Broxton said. And Manager Don Mattingly, who has selected the two-time All-Star his closer, says the same. But neither player nor coach can identify a reason for Broxton's late-2010 slump.

Broxton, 26, has chosen an anti-intellectual — or is it actually uber-intellectual? — approach to solving his problems, as has long been his custom. As a closer, he says he's been conditioned to forget about a blown save. He won't change just because there were seven of them last year.

The soft-spoken but hard-throwing Georgian says he never bothered to examine what went wrong over his last 31 appearances, when he had a 7.58 earned-run average and was temporarily displaced as the Dodgers' closer.

He dismisses radar-gun readings that indicated he had lost a couple of ticks off his fastball by questioning the accuracy of the speed-measuring devices. He says he "might have gotten into some bad habits," but claims to not know what they were. The closest he comes to acknowledging that conditioning might have been an issue is by revealing that this year he started running a month earlier than usual."