Thursday 17 May 2012

Adam Lind AAA'ed, Stuff


Lotta news today.  Starting with Lind-- wasn't really ready for this.

Nor was I ready for Kyle Drabek having such a nice start last night, but heh. More on him in a second.  Just to think, a year or so ago, Adam Lind was more or less on fire, picking up the slack for Jose Bautista, while Kyle Drabek was shitting himself on his way to a demotion back to the minors.  Not that Drabek isn't another three or four garbage starts away from a trip to Vegas or anything, just uh... haha, Lind.

Lind has been pretty fucking terrible over the last year, after having a red hot first two months last year, and a good season in 2009.  I don't think we really need to rehash just how terribad he's been over the last 2+ seasons or so, since we've done it over and over (and so have a lot of others), so we won't delve in to that.  What we will say is something along the lines of "Hey guys, you can stop saying stuff like 'Let's trade Adam Lind' because he won't fetch dick."

I doubt he ends up getting released or anything (yet), because they're obviously going to give him another shot, especially considering the fact that he's got the rest of this season and all of 2013 left on his contract, which equals about $9MM ($5MM for both '12 and '13), plus three club options with $3.5MM worth of buyouts.  I'm not sure what they think they can get out of him once he returns, but he's probably a halfway decent bench option, albeit an expensive one, compared to whatever the other options are. They're probably going to give him more time on the bench than Juan Rivera or Mark Teahen before straight up releasing him, if that's really an option down the road.

As for last night, we'll give JPA the zaunhead for his effort, though we probably could have found any number of deserving parties (Edwin and Drabek, namely).  Giving one to Alex Anthopoulos for demoting Adam Lind is probably something that I'd typically do in this situation, but this shit is about 9 months overdue.

Drabek looked a bit better than he has in his last few starts.  He spread 3 hits over 7 innings, but he still walked 4, and threw just 60 of 113 pitches for strikes. He's still missing the zone way too much, especially to right-handed batters.

I'd just do the "Joe Maddon vs. Ricky Romero" thing against Drabek and load the lineup with RHB's if I were an opposing coach.  Having said all this, I'm encouraged, at least a little, by Drabek's start last night.  I know I shit on the guy a lot, but it's out of love.  His performance against lefties is definitely encouraging, and it would appear that he's attacking (finding?) the zone a little better, because he's at least close on a lot of his pitches, and he's getting enough swinging strikes to make it passable.


Stuff
Yan Gomes (and not Travis Snider) has been recalled to fill Lind's roster spot.  He'll play 3B tonight, because Brett Lawrie has dropped his appeal of his suspension.  Lawrie decided that there wasn't really a whole lot of point to the appeal, as long as Joe Torre knew that there was no physical harm intended.  Anyway, Gomes had a nice spring, and has been good in AAA (in hitter-heaven LV, mind you), and can play 1B, 3B, and C, which will give the Jays some flexibility in terms of not having Edwin or Omar Vizquel play 3B.  It would appear that Edwin is going to play 1B everyday, moving forward.  Could be worse, I guess.  I'd rather Bautista go to first, Snider come up, and Edwin stay at DH, but whatever; I'm sure they wanted Gomes for his defensive flexibility, and once Lawrie comes back, that could very well fill the spot if they're sending Gomes back down.  With Lawrie and Lind out tonight (and I'm not sure what the deal is with Eric Thames), this lineup looks kind of depressing tonight.  I guess it's just going to take some time getting used to the post-Adam Lind (hopefully) era.

I realize this post was all over the place, but I'm trying to get it up before the game starts, and I just got home a little while ago and came home to all this news, and immediately started speculating.  I won't have my own computer for the next week at least, since I had to take it in due to an impending motherboard destruction, so I couldn't really make a new post out of everything that happened, and won't be able to do so for a little while either.

Arod gets his turf day, with Jeter back in the lineup.


Lineups
Jays
Johnson 2B
Escobar SS
Bautista RF
Edwin 1B
JPA C
Francisco DH
Rasmus CF
Gomes 3B
Davis LF

Hutchison P

Yankees
Jeter SS
Granderson CF
Cano 2B
Teixeira 1B
Ibanez LF
Swisher DH
Chavez 3B
Jones RF
Martin C

Hughes P

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