Jim Edmonds was just released by the Padres. I’m thinking he’ll be picked up quickly.
In other news, the D-backs blew their game against the Cubs this afternoon. No excuse for this at all. I don’t like baseball in 40 degree weather in May, though.
I’m off to watch Oakland beat the Rangers tonight!
Cubs Win! Cubs Win! Cubs Win!! 
Ugh. Didn’t like that one at all.
Oh well, at least I’m a two team fan.
I’m going to go watch the Oakland A’s demolish Texas. It is way above 46 degrees, too!
Hey fellow Yankee fans, Kei Igawa is back, baby!
Back to sucking really, really hard.
Yeah, Kei Igawa doesn’t deserve to be in the majors with that stuff. Ick. Throw him back.
Actually, if I were you, I’d be concerned about that eighth innning pitching job by Cruz. That was pretty poor pitching. Home run to Lee, walk Ramirez on some really bad pitches, let Fukudome get aboard without much trouble, then after making the rookie catcher look like a fool (hey, you nut, if he’s thrown you the same pitch twice in a row, he just MIGHT not throw it to you a third time!), walk de Rosa with really really bad pitches, then almost let the whole thing get blown open with a mediocre at best job of pitching to the .266 batter Johnson.
Of course, since it was the Cubs, they let y’all off the hook quite nicely. :smack:
I would have replied sooner, but the vortex around him nearly got me.
Did I mention he was not a good choice to promote? I think I did.
Hell, the 45 year old Boomer would pitch better than Kei has.
Jim
Jays lose again, 6-1. It would be hard to imagine how a team could be more boring. Apparently there ARE a couple of teams with worse offenses, but it’s sure hard to imagine how it could be possible.
In their last 23 games the Blue Jays have scored more than five runs in a game exactly once. In effect, the pitching has to be great every night; not once this year has the team won a game when the opposition scored more than 5 runs. If your offense can’t steal at least one or two games, there’s just no way your pitching can be THAT good. You can’t throw a shutout every night.
What’s fascinating, watching the team flail, is how terrible the entire team is hitting. Not one player appears to be hitting the ball hard with any sort of regularity; they’re all hopelessly mistimed, pulling away from the ball and hitting ground balls. The number of double plays they’ve grounded into is astounding for a team with few baserunners. It’s like watching an entire team of Josh Barfields.
I’m usually really skeptical of “Fire the guy!” calls, but it’s difficult to believe that over the course of 37 games, essentially EVERY player on a team could be performing under expectations. EVen accounting for the big drop in hitting so far this year, the Jays have basically nobody who is hitting as well as you would have hoped, except for Scott Rolen, who just rejoined the team two weeks ago so maybe he hasn’t caught the disease yet, and Joe Inglett, who hasn’t played much. At some point you do have to think a houselceaning is in order.
But having said that, the offense was bad last year too. It was average in 2006, and bad in 2005. The team lacks a blue chip offensive talent (unless Rolen returns to 2004 form) and has a lot of moderate-ceiling players and only one legitimate Grade-A hitting prospect in the entire system. It’s just not a very good team, and I fear we’re witnessing the beginning of a period - probably coming into full force in 2009 or 2010 - when they might be cellar dwellers for several years.
There’s a lesson to be learned here about how successful sports teams are built, but it’s a bit late and I’m too tired to explain it.
The Series-winning 1906 White Sox, the “Hitless Wonders” with a .230 team BA, maybe?
Looks like the eBay price for “Chacin” Cologne will be going up now …
Speaking of bullpen meltdowns, right now it’s looking like Jason Isringhausen is the Cardinals’ weakest link. After blowing another save that the Cards should have won last night, Izzy himself admits he pitched like a second grader. :smack: I hope he can figure out and fix whatever’s wrong.
And part of the reason people were counting the Cardinals out was that they “lost” Edmonds, Rolen, and Eckstein. :dubious:
Can we trade him back to his Japanese club for a bag of balls or something else of equal value? On the plus side, the pen gave them a chance to get back in the game. But it officially looks like it’s going to a long season.
I asked about the WORST team with a good pitching staff. 
Anyway, believe it or not, the Hitless Wonders weren’t a bad offensive team. They only scored 3.7 runs a game, but the league average was just 3.67; Chicago didn’t have much of a batting average, but they got the runs home. They drew a lot more walks than anyone else and ran the bases well; in that environment, running bases with intelligence could make a huge difference. It was a really, really hard league to score runs in.
In theory we will tire of him and then trade him to a Western NL team. We will get back a player with some talent but over the age of 25. They will believe they can correct Kei’s issues and it will help removing him from NY. We might get someone that can give us a few good innings in relief or a decent utility guy.
I don’t think we will ever get our money’s worth out of Kei. It was a bad signing and I thought so at the time. Though for the record, I did not want to pay Dice K the money either and I suspect many in Boston are happy enough with their contract. That year I thought Hideki Okajima was the guy the Yanks should have grabbed and instead the Red Sox got a great bargain.
Jim
Ugh, looks like the D backs want to give up another game to the Cubs.
On the bright side for the Yanks, Rasner pitched another very good game:
**Pitcher IP PC H ER BB K **
Rasner 6.0 87 4 2 1 1
Good Lord, RickJay - our Tribe has fantastic starters and ho-hum hitters and we’re clobbering the fuck out of your Jays tonight. We’ve scored 8 first-inning runs in the first 35 games, and we scored 6 in the first on McGowan tonight.
I’ll extend my thanks to Toronto for helping us get our bats back, I suppose.
McGowan came into the game with a 2.95 ERA in 7 starts, and just two wins to show for it. He’s allowed a bad one now and then.
I suspect we’ll start seeing more of this. The offense is just so unbelievably, and consistently, bad that the starting pitchers must be thinking “I have to pitch a shutout or I’ll lose.” When you’re getting no support at all, it must be tremendously disheartening. On a real team, if you get off to a bad start and give up a few runs, you think, “Well, okay, but if I stop them now, maybe we can put some hits together, pull this one out.” On the Blue Jays, you give up four runs and that’s the ballgame. They can’t keep pitching as well as they have been feeling like the hitters aren’t going to help them at all.
The only question now is how soon and how atrociously the team will melt down. They’re much worse than the standings suggest; you look at them at 17-21 and think, “Well, shit, that’s not that bad. With that pitching, and few breaks here and there, a few guys hit like they’re capable, they could get into it.” Trust me; direct observation tells you this is a team in serious trouble that isn’t being coached well, and an understanding of the team’s current roster makeup will provide you with some alarming facts; they have **no ** legitimate hitting prospects above A ball. None. The cupboard is bare, and they’ve committed huge contracts to players of questionable All-Star status.
Will Gibbons be fired, then Ricciardi, or will Paul Godfrey fire them both and clean house? Will there be a desperate attempt to get someone to take Overbay off their hands? Will Rolen be traded for prospects? Burnett? Halladay?
What did happen to the minors of the Jays? I tend to only track the 2 NY teams and Boston for the minors.
We happen to be in a similar place as the Jays right now - very little run production except the odd awesome game. We’re also in a surprisingly shitty division so our 18-18 record puts us a half game out of first.
But, unlike the Jays, we have talent up the ying-yang. They’re just being lazy or something. Once again, Carroll and Cabrera were in the game and we won. I should write a letter to Eric Wedge about this.
I kind of feel sorry for Toronto. I wouldn’t want to be in the same division as the Yanks and Sox. Seems like they are forced to spend all kinds of dough or get to the back of the bus.
Everyone in Cleveland is slowly coming around to the “vision” of the post-90’s Indians. Glad we have such a solid base made up of farm-bred boys and can really hang tough with our tiny payroll.
Yeah, at least one team has contacted him. But who knows if he’ll play… If the Padres were a better team, they might have given him more time to get his game back. But they all pretty much suck right now.