You could say, “At least they’re not the Royals.” After an optimism-inducing start, the last week has been a total trainwreck.
It could be that i’m getting my math wrong here, but i was under the impression that a win in April counts exactly as much as a win in September.
I’ll bet that the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, after going 11-17 in September and nearly blowing a 5.5 game lead in the last two weeks of the season, were pretty happy that they had 17 wins and only 9 losses back in April.
Tells you how big a pain in the ass he must be. Both Thomas and Bonds are able to perform but who wants to pay the price? They hurt the clubhouse.
Jacoby Ellsbury is developing into a pretty special player. Not only does he have like 13 walks so far this year, but hit two homers yesterday and 30% of his fair balls are line drives. The older Boston fans out there probably are seeing more than a little Fred Lynn in him (Lynn was a bit before my time, and got traded before I became a big Sox fan), but while Lynn was fast Jake is a flat-out burner. I won’t even mention his top-of-the-order buddy Dustin Pedroia and the .364 batting average; the number of RBIs that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez will get this year is going to be pretty scary.
Agreed, but everyone parrots the line that it’s early in the season and that while winning is nice there’s still a whole lot of baseball to be played. I know that a variation on that theme makes up 90% of Lou Piniella’s post game press conferances. The other 10% is saying “Ahhhhh” and staring off into space. 
Last year’s Red Sox were the exact same way. Started hot, then cooled down (16-9) . Yankees had a bad start (10-14). Red Sox won the division.
Blasted Cubs one and a half games out in front… mutter, mutter. Why are my Cards looking so ordinary over the past few days? Why?! At least they have a series against Pittsburgh coming up. They should be able to overmatch the Pirates, right? Right?
And can we please get some consistent hitting behind Pujols? The guy is on pace for 154 walks this year. Last night, in a two-run game, Salomon Torres walked him on four pitches with the bases loaded. He not-quite-intentionally walked in a run rather than pitch to him. Argh!
[QUOTE=dalej42]
2. Manny Ramirez. You get thrown out of a game in the second inning arguing balls and strikes. What an idiot. If the Red Sox would have lost that game, you very well could have been the reason.
When we had him in Cleveland, we’d chuckle fondly about him.
Now we just laugh at him.
He flashed some power, but Ellsbury is not known to do such things. Meanwhile, Coco Crisp is still around to take at-bats away from the Red Sox youngster.
<<Sigh>>
The Cincinnati Reds are offically bad…again.
:mad:
Oh, baloney. Thomas has always been highly regarded as far as you or I know.
They released him because they don’t want to pay him in 2009 and didn’t have the stones to do it when they should have.
Yeah, that dumbass Manny. Funny how his teams have a way of winning, though.
Well, my Orioles are at 12-9, and running second in the AL East. Of course, the team has raised our hopes a few times over the past few years, with early-season heroics that were later followed by a return to sub-mediocrity. Hell, in 2005, they led all the way into the All-Star break before collapsing in a heap.
I don’t expect this year to be too much different. While the start has been quite good, the team really seems to be playing above its weight. Luke Scott and Nick Markakis are really hitting well, but much of the rest of the order’s numbers are pretty average.
Also, the Birds are 6-1 on one-run games. This is the best record in the Majors for those close games, and suggests that they have been somewhat lucky. Their X W/L is 10-11, two games below their actual record. Keep getting involved in one-run games, and the odds will probably come back to bite you on the ass.
The pitching hasn’t really been great either. There was one encouraging sign in tonight’s game against Seattle. Daniel Cabrera went 8 innings without giving up a single walk. I was dumbstruck. Cabrera has been a walk machine over the past couple of seasons, giving up the most walks in the American League in 2006 and 2007. If he can get some control, he could really rack up some wins, because he has some great stuff. I’m not holding my breath, though; this was most likely a one-night aberration.
RickJay, i’m curious to hear your take on the Jays putting Halladay through three complete games in a row. Is there something up with the bullpen up there, or was he just looking good enough to keep in on those starts? He ended up losing two of the three, but he seems to have pitched pretty well over those three games, giving up 10 earned runs, and with a WHIP of just about 1.10.
While his pitch counts haven’t been HUGE, he has ended up throwing over 100 pitches each time, with one game getting up to 117. It seems to me that you don’t want to ask a guy you rely on so much to throw more innings than necessary. Is there something i’m missing here?
You know a good healthy starter should be able to throw 120 pitches without problems. This 100 pitch count rule of thumb is verging on the silly at this point. I understand we will never see the 300 inning pitcher again, but 120 pitches is not that bad and there is no proof that it increases arm injuries.
Jim
I don’t know about the Frank Thomas thing. EVeryone and their mother knows that he starts slow and he had a short-term contract anyways. Is it simply about the money? I’m not convinced yet.
While i agree that 100 pitches should not be some automatic benchmark for pulling pitchers, there is evidence to suggest that, over the 100-pitch mark, the risk of short-term pitcher decline increases. The folks at Baseball Prospectus weigh the risk of short-term decline as “Minimal” for 101-109 pitches, and as “Moderate” for 110-121 pitches. This is not necessarily about the pitcher getting injured, but about how those extra pitches might affect his ongoing performance. Furthermore, the stress levels of pitchers’ arms and bodies, which can lead to injury, tend to increase exponentially once you get over 100 pitches.
This is not to say that there should be a simple pitch-count barrier beyond which a pitcher is automatically pulled from the game. Some pitchers can work effectively over long periods at high stress levels, while others cannot. It’s a matter of knowing whether your pitcher is one of those guys, and weighing the risk of injury and the risk of declining performance (for that pitcher) against the immediate need to keep him pitching.
I don’t know if Roy Halladay is a guy who can cope with consistent starts over 100 or 110 pitches. He looks like a horse to me, but pitcher size and horse-resemblance isn’t the only factor is pitcher resilience. He could be a guy who can pitch well even with high pitch counts, and whose arm doesn’t get tired until later in the count than other pitchers. In years where he hasn’t been injured, he seems to have averaged about 7-7.25 innings per game. I couldn’t find any figures for average pitch count per game.
Also, there’s the risk of leaving a pitcher in weighed against the situation in the game itself. All of Halladay’s three complete games this season have been quite close, with margins of no more than 3 runs.
The first game (at Texas, 4/12), he had a shutout going into the 9th, and i know that managers often like to allow pitchers the chance of a complete game shutout.
The second game (vs Texas, 4/17), he was down 3-1 at the end of the seventh, and gave up another run in the 9th to lose 4-1.
Last night, (at Tampa Bay), he was down 4-3 at the end of the sixth, and gave up another in the 8th to lose 5-3.
None of those starts, taken alone, looks like a bad decision regarding the complete game. The manager no doubt felt the games were close enough to leave in his ace, rather than go to the bullpen. Had the Blue Jays been losing (or winning) by 6 runs, i’m sure Halladay would have been pulled.
But, looking at the breakdown of last night’s game, i was rather surprised that Halladay went the whole game. In the bottom of the 6th, Halladay gave up a double, 4 singles, and a walk, conceding 4 runs. Now, i didn’t see the game, and it could be that the hits were all lucky bloops on good pitches, and that Halladay was still pitching really well, but it seems to me that an inning like this might be a good time to pull your ace, especially if he’s headed for his third straight complete game.
All this is why i asked RickJay the question. He has presumably been watching, or at least following, the Jays much more closely than i have, and might have an opinion on whether, in these particular instances, it was a good idea to give this particular pitcher three consecutive complete games.
As for your point about no more 300-inning seasons, the Baseball Prospectus analysis of starting pitching suggests that 300-innings seasons wouldn’t be too much of a strain, and that 275-inning seasons are eminently possible. The difference, though, is that their analysis suggests that the way to get more innings from your starters is NOT to pitch them deeper into games, but to pitch them on shorter rest.
They compare pitcher stats based on three days rest (four-man rotation) and four days rest (five-man rotation), and find virtually no difference in performance. They argue that a four-man rotation is a good idea, but that it brings with it a responsibility to monitor pitch counts and fatigue very closely, because more frequent starts AND higher pitch counts will quickly lead to fatigue, and the biggest danger of injury is throwing while tired.
What Exit?:
What an interesting coincidence that just hours after your post, one of my favorite blogs posted this.
But what else is it then?
I mean, why does it seem so strange to you, and to folks like gonzomax, that a team might be reluctant to pay a 41-year-old slugger 10 percent of its total payroll? Could it be, as RickJay suggests, that Blue Jays management just doesn’t know what to do, and has taken the step that will free up the most short-term money? You might be right that it’s about something else, but in the absence of specific evidence, isn’t the $10 million a reasonable explanation?
Also, i never really buy this “hurts the clubhouse” argument advanced by gonzomax, except in a very few instances. Sure, there are some players who are big enough assholes that they might adversely affect the whole organization, but such players are few and far between. While Thomas may have had disagreements with management at more than one of his clubs, the idea that he is some sort of clubhouse cancer that needed excising is, until supported with some actual evidence, silly speculation.
I don’t know. I think we can all agree that it’s not performance-related, though.
Depends what you mean by performance-related, though.
The raison d’etre of a baseball club is performance on the baseball field, so surely ideas about performance have at least something to do with the decision.
If by “not performance-related,” you mean that he wasn’t released specifically because of his performance over the first 20 games of the season, then i agree with you. RickJay has made a pretty strong case that the Blue Jays knew nothing about Frank Thomas’s abilities on April 20 that they didn’t know on April 1. It does seem unlikely that they fired him specifically for his poor start, especially when everyone knows that he tends to start slowly, and when, if we believe RickJay’s observations (which i do) he has been hitting the ball hard even when he’s getting out.
On the other hand, though, i think it’s stretching things to say that performance had nothing to do with it. If the Blue Jays thought that Frank Thomas was going to hit like Manny Ramirez in 2009, they would probably have no hesitation in letting his $10 million option kick in for next year. It could be, though, that they see a slugger on the downside of a great career, and believe that $10 million will be better spent elsewhere in 2009. Even if his recent form is not the deciding issue, notions about current and likely future performance were very likely part of their decision.
Doesn’t mean they were right, or wrong, necessarily. And it may, as RickJay suggests, be the sign of a front office that has no direction. I’m just trying to counter the apparent belief among some people that, if we can’t attribute it directly to his current performance, it must not be about performance at all, and that it must be because he “hurts the clubhouse.”
Well between your link and mhendo post, I will withdraw my complaint for now. (also known as I will eat crow.)
OK you kids, please proceed to play catch on my lawn, ignore the old crotchety baseball fan who hates these overly pampered pitchers of today.