adambr2

Great job Torres getting out of that, but we need to start hitting better with RISP. Two innings today with a runner at 3rd and nobody out is left stranded. That's keeping this game a lot closer than it should be.

Cripes. Are we ever going to get this guy out?

The interviewer started by saying he wanted to talk baseball, then called us a "mediocre team", showing he's not really qualified to talk about baseball. It's not 2004 anymore.

Not what we want to see from our $10M dollar reliever in his first outing.

Mota looked great that inning. Great location. If he could be a dark horse in the pen this year that would be HUGE.

A lefty?? Marmol is a righty.

Cripes. We've had like 2 good at-bats today, and one good piece of hitting that was cancelled out by crappy baserunning. Can we at least threaten to score, please?

Wow, a lot has changed since the 17th. Weeks finished spring training on a tear, going 11 for his last 24. He also finished spring training with 9 stolen bases despite getting basically an entire week off in the middle of March. Obviously what he does in the regular season will be all that matters, but this is great to see heading into the season after he struggled coming out of the gates. I'm looking forward to seeing him be the man at the top of the order for us this season.

I'm all for booing Gary Sheffield.

Some of those look close to right, some of them just look bizarre. Boche at #2? Leyland at #19? Most of those statistics are over the last 5 years. I would say Yost did a good job the first couple years when the W/L expectations were less and not as well lately when expectations were more. While he might have won close games in the past, I think it was his inability to make the key decisions to win close games that contributed to costing us a chance at the playoffs in 2007. I believe we set a franchise record in 3 run leads blown last year. Still, he's clearly done some things right since he came here. But Yost doing a good job with marginal talent in 2003 and 2004 isn't going to help him in 2008.

Shouse: Fastball, Slider, Change/Sinker --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Heh heh...well in name only, really.

Well, I thought they had the talent to win in '05 too (they had a good top 3 in the rotation with Sheets, DD, and Cappy, decent lineup, good bullpen and great closer). Lee was in his prime. But I guess whether or not they did, I don't really feel that is for Yost to say, at least not publicly. It sure seemed like he thought there was enough talent on the '05 team to win at the time.

Was anyone else a little bothered when Yost came out recently and stated that they just didn't have the talent to win in 2005? Not sure who else heard that, but it bothered me for a couple reasons.... 1 - He stated in 2005 that they did have the tools to win that year. Now I realize he may have just been stating the company line, but don't say that and then a couple years later say it wasn't actually true. That's stupid. 2 - They did have the talent to win in 2005. Maybe not the talent to win the division, but at least enough talent to be the .500 team that they were and maybe better. With Turnbow as one of the elite closers in the NL that year, you could argue that they were as good as the '07 Diamondbacks. 3 - I don't really think a manager should really be making statements like that. It sounds like a cop-out. I'm sure he didn't mean it that way, but shrugging and saying "not enough talent" really sounds like a lack of accountability for your team, even when the 2005 team was probably about right where they should have been.

For the life of me I can't figure out what the Cubs are thinking making Dempster a starter. He was an average reliever, and he has a 4.99 career ERA as a starter. He hasn't been a good starter since 2000. Now they lose depth in the pen and get a worse starter. This is a good move because he's "experienced"? You can't convince me that Marshall or even Lieber wouldn't be a better choice.

I don't think 170 innings is overextending Parra this year, but then again, I'm not Parra, his personal trainer, or a doctor, so I'm not positive what he can handle this year or what a safe amount of innings for him to work would be based on his prior injuries, arm strength, etc.. I'm just guessing he should be capped at about 170, max. Of course, the amount of innings he throws doesn't tell as much of the story as his actual pitch count. 5 innings of work from Ben Sheets is a lot different than 5 innings of work from Claudio Vargas.

Well, we still have one fall back guy when Gallardo is back. (I'm presuming Bush). Of course, with Vargas gone and Capuano out for the year, it starts to get thin after that. Any further injuries and we'd have to turn to Zack Jackson or Chris Narveson for starts.

Well, I don't think Parra would be starting the playoffs. They'd probably just go with Sheets, Gallardo, and Suppan. So I don't think Parra would pitch more than maybe 3-5 innings total of relief throughout the entire playoffs, since Villanueva would also then have bullpen duty. If Parra is still healthy at that point, and we're in the playoffs, I'm not overly concerned if we need 3-5 more innings out of him in October.

It blows me away every time I am discussing Gwynn with a friend and they maintain that Gwynn "always puts the bat on the ball". No, he doesn't. He strikes out a lot for a slap hitter. Baseball is chock full of generalizations, one being that players with no power always make contact.

He may be a grown man playing baseball, but I think letting him start the entire season and potentially pitch 200+ innings after never pitching over 140 before would potentially be a horrible mistake, one that Yost and Melvin might never live down. There's a reason that you generally don't increase a pitcher's workload by more than 30 innings a year, especially one with an injury history. It's because past results have not been favorable when that has been done.

I just think Bush is a better candidate for moving to the pen than Parra. I'm a little concerned with sticking Parra there for a month or two and then trying to build up his arm again to start. Especially in his rookie season, I think it'd be best just to not mess with his routine. He's built to be a starter. I think if you give Bush a couple weeks to adjust, he can come out of the pen without much trouble. The only real benefit of sending Parra to the pen that I can see is to keep his innings down. Ultimately though, I think which one of the 3 (Bush, Parra, Villanueva) that gets sent down to the pen will be pretty simple -- whichever one is performing the worst of the 3 in the rotation.

Let's assume we draw the line for Manny Parra at 170 innings this year. We can keep him around this mark, and still leave him in the rotation the entire year. We simply need to push back or skip his starts every chance we get. I checked it out, and if we do this, he should get around 27 starts this year. Assuming about 6 to 6 1/3 innings per start, that leaves Parra at between 162-171 innings. Sheets should start every time he's had 4 off days. Same with Suppan, unless Sheets has had 4 days. I'm assuming a mid-April return for Gallardo, at which point Bush should be pushed back to long relief. We can keep Parra in the rotation all year, without having to mess around and put him in the bullpen and throw him off his routine like we had to do with Gallardo last year for awhile. We just need to make sure to give him maximum rest between starts when possible. Hopefully, he'll be able to adjust when he has long layovers, because I think this would be the perfect way to keep his innings down while still the team the maximum benefit that Parra can give us.

Maybe it's just spring training, but I've been starting to notice some troubling trends. Jeff Suppan sprinting towards 2nd base only to get caught stealing. Runners rounding 2nd and getting thrown out easily at 3rd. All this getting praised as good, aggressive baserunning. I am worried about the approach we are taking. Stolen bases are fun and a good weapon to have. People love the aggressive base stealer and the clever hit and run. But overused, these can get a baseball team completely off track and run them out of innings. Just like the inning we ran ourself out of against Colorado yesterday. Yes, it's spring training, but we completely ran ourselves out of an inning because of over-aggression. We have more speed on the team now, but we're not a team built to win by stealing and hit and runs. We're going to hit a lot of homeruns and get a lot of extra basehits. I don't want to see those extra basehits ruin extra runs because we had Prince or Kendall trying to steal second base on the previous AB. Ned and Co, please, use the speed on our team wisely. I'm not going to turn this into Yost-bashing, but I feel like there have been times in the past when he'll continue to try to do something that might work once (bunting with 2 strikes with a position player, for instance) and continue to go for it until it inevitably fails a few times. Don't start a trend like this on the basepaths, please. You might be able to catch the other team off guard and sneak Bush over to 2nd base one time this year, but that doesn't mean that you should do it with Sheeter next time he's pitching. We have enough talent on this team to win. We don't need to try anything out of the ordinary to win baseball games or try to do things well that we might not be so good at.

So, we did a seemingly good job of improving our defense in the offseason, the real weak point from last year. The way I see it, we improved or stayed the same at every position except LF. I'm not saying we'll be a defensive jaggernaut now, but no reason we shouldn't at least be the middle of the pack in the NL. LF: Braun '08 vs. Menchkins '07 This is the only place we slighly regressed, at least on paper. However, it's arguably the least affected position by defense and it's not a given that Braun won't do well, maybe even well enough to have no real difference between '07 and '08. Jenkins was a solid defender. Mench was servicable at best, not covering a great deal of ground out there. CF: Cameron '08 vs. Hall '07 No contest. It's not like Hall was a butcher in CF, but no comparison to Cameron's gold-glove skills. RF: Hart '08 vs. Hart '07 Hart is already a good defensive player. If he does at least the same, which he should, we're fine. 3B: Hall '08 vs. Braun '07 Another no-contest. Defensively, Hall is pretty average at 3B, which will be a huge improvement over Braun. SS: Hardy '08 vs. Hardy '07 I like to think we might improve here as well. Hardy had a little bit a of a down-year defensively at SS, and I think he can do better. 2B: Weeks '08 vs. Weeks '07 Hopefully the extra year under his belt again improves the defense of Weeks, like it did last year. 1B: Fielder '08 vs. Fielder '07 Just like Hall and Weeks, it'd be great to see if the extra hours spent on defense with Seder pay off. C: Kendall vs. Estrada Estrada was pretty much garbage defensively, but Kendall isn't a major upgrade by any means. He can't really do worse, though. So as much as we all like to see better defense out on the field for us, the only thing I really care about it and the only thing that really matters is -- how many extra wins will it amount to? If it amounts to 5 extra wins over the course of the season, that upgrades us to an 88 win team on defense alone -- playoff territory.

The thing is, Suppan really wasn't a disappointment last year. He was exactly who he is every year. Pretty much all of his numbers were at or right near his career averages. Those expecting Suppan to toss out a sub 4.00 ERA in 2008 are probably going to be disappointed again. He's just not that good. He's a so-so starter who will eat up 200+ innings and made a big paycheck off his NLCS performance. Did we overpay? Well, you won't hear me argue against that. If we could unload him and the $25M remaining on his contract after 2008, I'm all for it. There's a handful of teams out there that wouldn't have a problem paying $12.5M a year for 2 years to solidify their rotation. He'd make a hell of a #5 pitcher anywhere. And he is a good pitcher to have in a pennant race as he seems to get stronger as the season goes on. That was definitely the case in '05 and '06, and in '07 to a lesser extent. I think Soup will probably see a slight improvement in his numbers in '08, mostly on the benefit of pitching in front of a better defense. I'd be thrilled with something like 4.15 and a 16-10 record.

Now that it sounds like Yost has pretty much decided to bat Kendall 9th, I give him some credit for having the balls to go a little bit against conventional thinking to try this. Especially since he's going to be absolutely raked over the coals if the offense struggles in the first month or two, even if it's not because of the lineup order.