igor67

Well one could certainly aruge that if you bring up Weeks and have Hall and the coming around Hardy battling it out for PT at SS your cutting down the underperforming spots in the line up to just Jenkins. Realistically Hall's contribution to this point in the season has been to make our middle IF production merely very bad as oppossed to two spots of Neifi Perez black hole goodness. I wonder if Hall could catch????

Pretty heads up play by Krynzel to nail the guy at third, how many OFs just come up gunning for home in that situation?

You know this start to the season just isn't natural, russ avoiding the 3TO like the plague hitting singles and doubles. Bill Hall walking and laying off 2 offspeed pitches in the dirt in the same AB? It's creepy.

Well Bruso hasn't completely failed yet. Some of it is just a numbers game. There's a lot of systems out there that should snap him up and see what happens. It's kind of a new feeling to be the organization that's losing talent in these transactions.

I'm usually more level headed than this but is Rottino not the position player equivalent to Mike Adams? The undrafted guy who not only makes, but actually looks to be a more than fringe player? If he sticks at third or catcher he's our best bat at either position. There is just something exciting about a guy who justs hits the ball.

Another thing to keep in mind even if it is early spring training in the Cactus league still favors the hitters.

Thought Housman with a couple of strike outs was significant news for the game. I believe in the guy I'm not sure why, but I'll be surprise if he doesn't make it as atleast a LOOGY

Guys like Heether and Festa are nice depth both have some useful tools and performance to indicate they could turn into useful players. Seriously Heether isn't that much worse of a prospect than Helms was in my mind, and he gets some points for actually having a glove. A+ will be a good test, can he move up a level and adjust fast enough? And as a plus it will be so much easier to tell with our new affiliate. I think we can all guess what would have happened had he played in HD. Those doubles would start magically flying over the wall and he'd probably reverse those numbers to 35 hr and 20 doubles. Leaving us with precious little idea if it was mirage or the next level in power development.

This is a nice little under the radar transaction. Bringing in a guy with recent MLB success on a minor league contract would have been a major talking point in years past. Given the state of the bullpen though it deseerves atleast some consideration as a good move to have more depth.

Unfortunate, but I still think JJ will be ready. It really sounds like playing in Mexico is just as bad as playing in Philly. Very tough environment to jump into without having seen real pitching in 9 months or so.

Troy does have an edge, but I think the more prudent strategy is to stick with RB, and target a premium pitcher, catcher, or RF. Know if we had been talking about Scott Rolen I'd say spend away.

Nice start by Ben I wonder if the extra time off helped him recharge a little bit? Sure'd be nice to see one more start like this one to finish off the season for him.

I was going to ask about Alcidies, but I had to teach yesterday. So it was nice to see him mentioned especially without prompting. Clearly he's got some folks interested and I'm even more curious now that it's been hinted that there maybe some power lurking in that teenage frame.

Gotta figure Ned is going to want to see some more of that glove the rest of the season.

I think Eveland is a more realistic comp for some of our DFE's Patrick. Dana was a guy they always wanted to sign, but got caught up in a small numbers game. Which is to say that Dana was much more valued before his college season than Manny was, but in the end both were pretty exciting prospects. Given the general Canada talent fall and the relatively high rounds some of those guys were picked I'd say that it's not all that unrealistic to expect a prospect to be in about that category of talent. Manny still remains a rare case because his jump in value was so high not because his final pre-draft status was so high.

The pitching has declined somewhat in the second half, but not in any sort of unreasonable way. Davis and Sheets still look like a pretty good pair at the top of the rotation. Santos may or may not be 5th spot fodder or he just may have worn down. The bullpen has taken some knocks in the second half, but a lot of it was Kolb having a more reasonable performance. On balance though I'd say our pitching staff is light years ahead of where they were coming into the season and that's a pretty big positive. The offense is just so bad. If you are going to continue to lead Pods off Overbay needs to hit 3rd slump or not. With his steal numbers and Overbay's doubles we have an excellent chance to score if those two are bunched in the line-up. Instead we've got the no batting average and power wunderkins stuck in there and frequently just leave Scotty stuck at second. As disfunctional as this offense is quirky things like line-up construction become more important. But at this point that's just small potatoes because we've only got two real hitters in the line-up. Clark makes modest contributions with his OBP in a line-up otherwise devoid, and Jenkins has chipped in modest power, but despite getting to lukewarm levels he's still been pretty bad. We talked a lot about stranding baserunners early in the season, but with Keith remaining mostly a hacker and Counsell's batting skills reduced to only walking we're not even getting baserunners anymore. Branyan has plugged one hole, but we've still got pits at catcher and SS with the entire OF barely a step above. It's going to take atleast 2 BIG upgrades out of those spots to really get this offense to respectability. I happen to think despite missing most of the year that Hardy can provide one of those Big improvements, but even if Doug feels similarily he can't really count on Hardy doing much more than playing good defense and hanging in there, so he's got to do everything he can to provide some serious boost.

Yes I fondly remember the argumnets last year about closing the Dominican and Venzuelan teams down. Nice to see the money to back up the words from Melvin even if he has shown himself to be credible. So at this point is it safe to say that Roque is as much a prospect as Martinez and Mieses ever were? And let's face it if this wasn't the summer of the Hurricane that's all we ever had to show for a decade of latin american scouting.

Sheets won't blow it today he has to get to 11 wins again. I'd really like it if he got to 12 just to not have one of those weird statistical monkeys on his back, but 11 just seems so plausible at this point. And walking Clark to face Hall??? Whose managing over there Davey Lopester?

OK I've got to defend Ned on not starting Krynzel. Now I would have started him, just like I would have started Hart way back when he was up. But Ned has established a pretty clear pattern when a new player comes on board he tends to be a little conservative in evaluating them. Is this such a horrible thing? This small bit of defrence to guys already on the team probably helps him command some amount of respect and loyalty rather than the I'll start the flavor of the month player. I just don't see this particular pattern of behavior as a significant negative. A couple more ABs for David isn't going to turn him into a superstar next year.

Well it's terrible premature to say that Hendrickson "silenced" his critics. It was just one game against the Pirates, but he has now had as many good starts on the year as Obie. Hopefully with Moeller catching him and a respectable start under his belt he can settle in for the last month.

I don't think we have any line-up without Overbay that isn't a no hitter waiting to happen.

I think perhaps it's time to give Ned a little bit of a break on playing Russ. The guy is playing afterall and it certainly looks like he would have been playing for the last 3 weeks had not his wrist flared up. The Battle was won because Russ took his chance and made the most of it. Loyalty isn't the worst trait for a manager to have as a fault. As long as he extends it to younger players too.

The question I have is does this count as a clutch hit?

You know I could give Yost ever so much of a shred of benefit of the doubt at first with Branyan and being skeptical. Playing the guy a couple of days in a row to atleast see what he could do was impressive in it's own small way. And you know when he had drawn like 2 walks and hit a single and a HR in 4 games or whatever while King a whole bunch, I was ready to watch him fade into irrelavance. But after yesterday, there is no concieveable reason short of Russ being incapacitated for him not to be starting. I can't see any logic to it at all. Only some sort of ridiculous loyalty to Helms an possibly justify it.

One of the important things for me in evaluating a GM is to make sure I don't fall into the bad year trap. Any GM can just have a year where all the breaks go a different direction. I think that's happened to JP this year as well as Baird. Of course KC had all the breaks go for them last year, so there's a little cosmic justice there. A guy like Sabean has had atleast one off year I think. Clearly Schuerholz hasn't in many years, but those deals with the devil can be powerful things. The flipside is proclaiming a GM a genius based on one really good year. Bill Stoneman is the good example here. He's OK, but he's done some very questionable things when it comes to constructing that team.