If brevity be the soul of wit, then blog on, bloggerman!1) Jo-Jo Reyes is your number two starter: Okay, that's a stretch, but amongst the regular starters, his ERA+ ranks only behind Ricky Romero. (And Carlos Villaneuva, whose awesomeness probably deserves its own bullet point.) Our point here is not to hype Jo-Jo into something that he's not (which was our pre-season mistake), but merely to underscore that a guy who was about to be run out of town two weeks ago ("useless", "waste of a roster spot") is now a guy who the team will depend upon to give them quality innings for the next few months. Beacuse...
2) Kyle Drabek is wild man! WILD!: Drabek has walked more batters than he's struck out (45 to 43). Yikes. And if you want to double down on your worries, listen to Keith Law on the June 2nd edition of the Baseball Today podcast, wherein he wonders if this sort of lack of command indicates some form of injury. (Our two cents is that we think Drabek might have been able to get Double-A hitters to swing at hard stuff out of the zone more so than big leaguers. That's what passes for positivism around here.) Also, KLaw quite rightly questions John Farrell's handling of Drabek in that inning by not letting him extricate himself from the mess he'd made, given that it's part of the learning process.
Does Drabek's recent struggles mean he should go back to the minors and put in some time against Triple-A pitchers? It might work out well, considering...
3) Brett Cecil's wife thinks Brett Cecil is ready for promotion: We tend not to monitor the Twitter accounts of Jays' wives and girly-girls, because we're already creepy enough. But we couldn't help but notice the retweets of Jennifer Cecil's timeline from last night, as her fella tossed a complete game, six-hitter as the Las Vegas 51's won 4-1. The one run was on a homer which Mrs. Cecil assures us would have been a double in Toronto, and she noted that he was touching 94 MPH and regularly hitting 91. Take that as you will. Perhaps if Cecil were to be recalled, he could share a cab with...
4) Gordie Dougie!: For all of the pissing and moaning we've done in pushing back on the many fans who were calling for his immediate integration into the MLB roster, we'll confess to being as excited as any of you now that the recall is imminent. The power-speed-contact-discipline numbers that we've seen from Lawrie in the past month are enough to make even us, Your Scolding Auntie, trip over our knickers in anticipation. And won't he look splendid lining up next to...
5) AL All-Star Shortstop Yunel Escobar!: Actually, June-Yell is going to be in tough when it comes to making an appearance in this year's game, given the extraordinary seasons of other AL shortstops. Even with the pretty nice start that Escobar has put up, he's still in a three-way tie for fourth amongst AL SS's in fWAR. (Though Erick Aybar's and Elvis Andrus' 1.7 fWARs are fuelled mostly by stolen bases, and we suppose that you could start to pick apart what value should be placed on SBs if you were so inclined. We'll say that we LIKE the fact that Yunel has only one stolen base this year. So there. SMALL BALL SUCKS!)
All this to say (wtf happened to all the brevity we promised), if you want Yunel to make the All-Star roster ahead of The Shell of Derek Jeter, Alexei Ramirez or Asdrubal Cabrerra, you might have to buckle down and find the time to get your 25 votes in for our boy in the middle infield.
And don't go to sleep on José Bautista either! You remember how that hot girl on American Idol got voted off because no one thought she needed their votes, and then the creepy country kid with the head tilting won? Don't let that happen to the One Man Gang!
Have a great weekend!
Cecil's son (?) 's name is BRYTON??? What IS that???!!
ReplyDeleteBrett Cecil's wife referred to herself as a "mama bear" in a tweet. That took a bit of the shine off for me. (then again, maybe she isn't a Sarah Palin acolyte)
ReplyDeleteI dunno. I kinda assume that most athletes are Republicans or worse.
ReplyDeleteMorrow follows Obama on twitter, and seems like a bit of a democrat if you think about it.
ReplyDeleteI guess if you use ERA you get Reyes doing that well, but that pretty much shows you why you shouldn't use ERA (or ERA+, by extension). XFIP is probably the way to go, given that you want to focus on K's, BB and expected HR rates. At which point Reyes is 5th if you include Villanueva, and not really that far off from where Cecil was.
ReplyDeleteMorrow, Romero, Litsch & Villa are all doing better then Reyes by that.
The reason I went with XFIP over FIP is that a guy with a 35% GB rate isn't going to maintain a sub 10% HR rate pitching half his games in Toronto.
I get what you're trying to say, but Reyes shouldn't be anything more then a guy who starts when someone is injured.
Yeah, Tao, probably 99.7% of white athletes are Republicans. Latinos, with the exception of Venezuelans, are probably hardcore plutocrats or fascists.
ReplyDeleteIf my physical abilities and bank account put me in the 99.99 percentile of human achievement, I probably wouldn't be a leftie either.
As it is, I am stuck with the hoi polloi -- at least until I find a power source for my robot Cerberus.
Thoughts on the demotion of Eric Thames?
ReplyDeleteThames will be back soon enough.
ReplyDeleteLet's let Lind settle in (2 homers today) first, then we can decide on the bench.