Still Laughing

While I was away, Jim Baker was slaying the Mitchell Report.

I'm still chuckling.

Obligatory Blue Jays content : Vegas Garcia and Bolivar Hudson.

The Title!?

No one has asked yet but I figure I better nip this one in the bud. The blog title is a quote (one of the best in a book packed full of them) from Michael Lewis's Moneyball.

The New Player

Before the Rule 5 draft, of course, we shouldn't forget that the Jays also added Buck Coats from the Reds for future considerations; those have since proven to be RHP Justin James.

Let's do James first; simply put, he's got a starter's stuff but a reliever's repetoire. James throws fastball/changeup and has a little curve that doesn't do much for him. The fastball tops out in the high 80s though, so he depends on the change to be successful. He's an interchangeable righthanded fifth/sixth-inning guy.

Coats was pretty much a forgotten man in Cincinnati, who never showed much desire for the guy, but frankly I don't think he got any more respect from the Cubs who originally drafted him and then tried to find a position for him where he could carry both his glove and his bat. He's absolutely no shortstop although the Cubs tried him there for three years after moving him off centerfield, and he doesn't have the quickness for second base, so his success will depend on his bat and being able to play a good centerfield. I doubt he'll be more than the fourth-best centerfielder on the big league team, though, so I don't see a job for him unless he bumps his OBP 40-50 points.

I'd be shocked if Coats ended up with more service time than James. You can always use a 12th pitcher like James to soak up mid-game innings when you're losing; a guy who hits like Coats but who can't play the infield, is a guy you'll have a hard time finding a spot for if you already have a good defensive outfield.

The New Pitcher

The new pitcher on the major league roster, by the way, is Randy Wells. Here are his stats in reference form and in cube form. The first thing to like about Randy Wells is he was a 38th-round pick, but unfortunately he wasn't a legit 38th-rounder but a draft and follow. But he has had solid numbers at every stop and managed to increase his strikeout rate last season while spending the whole year at AAA, although part of that would have been the conversion from full-time starter to swingman. Iowa's a bit of a hitter's park but it's good for strikeouts.

Wells remains puzzlingly hittable despite the good strikeout numbers and a touch of wildness, so there's a conundrum there to be solved. The Blue Jays have been spectacularly smart about their young pitchers over the last couple of years, really since Arny took over with the pitchers, so there's hope if it's Arny seeing something and not just a wild hair by Jon Lalonde and his team. Wells seems to project as a classic righthanded long man, something we don't see much of anymore.

Repost : Bases on Balls

This piece was first posted elsewhere, but I still stand behind it 100%. It's from September 28, so the reference to "last night" is to this McGowan start against the Devil Rays, in which he pitched relatively poorly but picked up his 12th and final win (it was his final start).

Studs Terkel tells the story in Ken Burns's "Baseball" series of George Stallings, the great manager of the Miracle Braves of 1914. Stallings was dying (this would have been in 1929) and when an old friend came to visit the dying man, he asked him "George, what's killing you?"

The reply came quickly,

"Bases on balls."

I was reminded of this little anecdote last night in watching good ol' Victor Zambrano get lit up for eight runs in the first inning (and later by watching Radhames Liz walk the bases loaded with no one out, before Leo Mazzone had to pop out of the dugout and scream at his rookie pitcher to throw some strikes. Liz proceeded to mow down ten Blue Jays in a row). You see, I talk with other Jays fans often about the pitching staff which has performed so briliantly this season, and the nearly desperate situation at the bottom of the Jays' batting order. There's a lot of general agreement out there on what needs to be done - with a surplus of young pitching (always the most sought-after commodity of major league baseball managers) the Blue Jays find themselves in an excellent position to make a trade and land a shortstop who can produce something with the bat. With John McDonald hitting about .150 since August (OK, he's actually at .xxx) this situation has been looming larger and larger for next season.

Who to trade? I hear a lot of highly unrealistic talk about trading Scott Downs or Casey Janssen or even Shaun Marcum for a good shortstop. Folks, it's not going to happen. Which is why I think the Jays should be looking to trade Dustin McGowan. Why? Those self-same, manager-killing bases on balls.

I don't like Dustin McGowan. He doesn't throw strikes.

We saw this in full flower in McGowan's last start against the Yankees, where that well-drilled and well-prepared team took pitch after pitch against McGowan and constantly worked themselves into 3-1 and 3-2 counts. (Say what you will about Joe Torre... Joe's teams always have an idea about what the are going to do in a game. They have a plan.) McGowan's problem, to the extent that it is a problem, isn't exactly young-pitcher wildness, either. McGowan isn't like Daniel Cabrera, who has no idea where the next pitch might end up, and he's not like Victor Zambrano either, who just can't be arsed where the next pitch endds up. McGowan quite deliberately makes a lot of pitches off the plate. It's a choice for him. And it's the type of choice that a catcher can't always do a lot about, either. Although Gregg Zaun keeps his pitchers on a much tighter rein than Jason Phillips, who loved to waste pitch after pitch setting up well out of the strike zone, there's not much Zaun can do if he sets up on the outside corner and McGowan throws it six inches outside.

This works a treat against teams who don't plan, or don't hit well (a team like the Orioles or the Devil Rays) because they tend to chase unhittable pitches early in the count.

McGowan's ten-million-dollar arm is, without a doubt, widely perceived as the jewel of the young Toronto pitchers. He will bring far more than pitchers like Janssen and Marcum with wider repetoires and more disciplined behaviour on the mound. And McGowan does not in fact walk a lot of batters, but until and unless he learns to choose to throw more strikes, he may never reach the heights that a more focused pitcher will. McGowan's a stud - I don't want to trade him. But if that's the only way to bring a talented infielder to the team, I think the Jays need to seriously consider it.

So what is this thing?

"This thing", as you so rudely call it, is "Colamarino Has Titties". It purports to be a source of useless and possibly harmful Blue Jays information and analysis, from AA bosoms to the bullpen candy sack to the Venezuelan Summer League. And we will discuss the Rao-Wu Bootstrap Variance Estimator. Oh yes, we will, and we will discuss its properties long into the night.

Well, here we go

I've been wanting to set up a Blue Jays blog for a while now, and their acquisition of Brant Colamarino in the Minor League version of the Rule 5 Draft yesterday gave me the perfect impetus.

Obviously, Colamarino has been drafted as organizational filler at first base, and I assume this means David Smith will be on his way which is too bad. I imagine that Chip Cannon will play first for Syracuse and Colamarino will back him up or back up whoever gets the promotion to AA.