Well the season is off to a good start. Yanks and Tampa are playing great. The Red Sox aren’t.
Anyone think the A’s will hang around at all or will they be spent by the end of June?
I’m sure the Jays will fade.
The Mets seem to have some hope to stay afloat until Beltran returns. The pitching has actually been good. Winning their 20 inning marathon game the other day I think was huge for them. Promoting the rookie, Ike Davis for a spark was an excellent move. I had not realized he was Ron Davis’s son. That is pretty cool.
Which is fine, except that a big part of their decent start is Alex Gonzalez, who’s on a pace to hit 40 home runs and 100 RBI’s. (The generic) You’re crazy if you expect him to do that for a full year, so Overbay will need to pick up the slack when Gonzalez (and Vernon Wells, to a lesser extent) inevitably slack off.
That said, I realize that Overbay’s not a .127 hitter, and he’s in the process of coming around.
He’ll come around to hitting .260 with 13 homers or something like that, which isn’t enough for a first baseman.
The Jays aren’t a good offensive team and their performance so far is a fluke. By year’s end they’ll be one of the three or four worst hitting teams in the league. I’ve enjoyed Vernon Wells’s Willie Mays impression so far but it won’t last.
The Reds hitting and pitching have been pretty underwhelming and inconsistent given some of the good talent that they have. That said, they did muster 11 runs last night to beat the Dodgers…
They already have the fourth-worst batting average in the league, at .232; and OBP is also fourth-worst, at .308. Their OPS is better; sixth at .760, OPS+ at 109, but that’s mainly because they’ve had success at knocking the ball out of the park, which has boosted the SLG.
Still, if this is their “fluke” performance so far, I’d hate to see the results when they inevitably trail off.
I had them winning the division, so yes I think they will hang around. Sheets needs to pitch better than he has thus far though for them to have a shot.
The Mets lineup is predictably awful, but the starting pitching has been quite strong. If Pelfrey and Niese can elevate themselves to middle rotation starters, it will provide some benefit in what is likely to become another lost season. I would call the Ike Davis call-up more of a desperate move than an inspiring one. He still hasn’t proven he could hit lefties or breaking pitches in the minors. Still, he is certainly more exciting to watch than Mike Jacobs or Fernando Tatis.
Must be the lack of protection behind him in the lineup with Arod hurt causing Teix poor start… Or perhaps not.
In the Cards-Mets marathon the other night, around the 15th or 16th inning, the Cards had a man on third, a man on first and no outs. Am I crazy, or do you not send the runner to second on defensive indifference, and then immediately squeeze bunt-twice in a row if necessary?
I’m not a big fan of the sac bunt, and I know the statheads hate it, but the rationale is that you effectively defuse big innings by giving away outs. This, being the bottom of the inning in an extra inning game, is a special case where one literally wins the game.
Seems dead obvious to me, but I never heard a single commentator mention it during or after the game; anybody want to talk me down?
The Orioles, at 2-13, are currently on pace to win a total of about 22 games. I know the rest of the season probably isn’t gong to be quite that bad, but it’s still not looking very good.
They’ve been pretty bad for awhile now. I hear a lot of blame getting hurled at Angelos, but are there other mitigating factors as to why they are so awful? I know they play in the toughest division, but don’t they have a huge payroll and essentially nothing to show for it?
When it started falling apart their payroll was as large as the Yanks. Their player development and general plan has been pretty bad and Angelos is the big reason (IMO)
Angelos is a terrible owner. Awful. Terrible. Bad for baseball bad. And, his ego and antics have led to bad teams, and a fanbase that doesn’t think much of him and they aren’t willing to support an inferior product while they mature into better players. But, I do think the Orioles have the look of a team that is on the rise. Lots of young players, and from reports the farm system has a lot more in store. Their payroll is listed as 17 of 30 for the majors. In their own division they are 10 and 20 million ahead of the Rays and Jays and 120 and 80 million behind the Yankees and Red Sox. So, that payroll isn’t the value that the Rays have, but it isn’t embarrassingly huge, either.
As a Dodger fan, I’d like to dispute this statement. We knew we had a weak bullpen, but I didn’t think our starting pitching was going to be quite this much of a question mark. I’m very used to watching this team struggle offensively. I have no idea what to do with all the runs we’re giving up.
I guess the games are entertaining, but we’re coming up on the wrong side of them too often. Coming back last night from a 9-3 deficit only to blow it in the bottom of the 8th with shaky pitching and an even shakier defense was heart-breaking. The bright side is that we might be on the verge of getting back two of our more solid bullpen performers (Kuo and Bellisario), but if we have to keep taking out our starters in the 5th inning, it may not matter.
It was the 14th, and the runner went to second on DI, as I said, but the bunt(s) never came.
Bottom 14th: St. Louis
J. Mather doubled to shallow left
B. Ryan safe at first on pitcher H. Takahashi’s fielding error, J. Mather to third
B. Ryan to second on fielder’s indifference
S. Schumaker struck out swinging
R. Ludwick struck out swinging
A. Pujols intentionally walked
B. Hawksworth struck out looking
(From the Yahoo play-by-play)
Mather started in centerfield, so we can say he isn’t slow, Ryan has some speed and Schumaker is basically a utility guy in the lead off slot-presumably he can bunt.
Well any deep fly out would also win the game and it comes down to how good the batter was at bunting. We could give La Russa the benefit of the doubt and assume the batters were not good.
If I’m remembering right, this was a bunt: Ryan bunted, and the pitcher fielding it took his eye off the ball and bobbled it just enough that his throw to first wasn’t in time to get Ryan out.
Are you asking why Schumaker or Ludwick didn’t try to bunt in a run? How likely would that have been to work? Surely the Mets would have been protecting the plate.