Go Time: Still Alive

Holy crap.  I've been busy.  Work just kept on sneaking up on me and kept happening until like 8:00PM pretty well every night this week, or at least until pretty close to game time.  I assume you all have some other outlet to get caught up on recent Jays news, but if not, you're probably giving me too much credit, and other Jays blogs/websites not enough.

It's Dickey Day in Canada, presented by Scotiabank today.  Here's hoping his back and neck don't have him any grief and that he can get in to the 7th or 8th inning, because this bullpen usage is getting a little absurd.  The Jays have the third most innings thrown by the bullpen so far this year, behind only Houston and Pittsburgh.  They're right in the middle of the pack as far as bullpen ERA is concerned, so it's not that they aren't effective or anything (Casey Janssen's pure awesomeness is probably skewing those numbers towards the positive), it's just that it would be nice to not have to go to the bullpen early and need to use Aaron Loup for two innings every other day.  So yeah, get 'em Dickey.

It was encouraging to see Ricky Romero have a couple nice innings last night.  He appeared to be looking down at his finger after every pitch in the 4th, so I'm wondering if there was a blister or a fingernail problem or something.  I figure they mentioned that on the broadcast, but I was listening to the game on the "Park" setting on MLB.TV (which has got to be one of the most beautiful inventions ever, by the way), so I dunno.

Finally, I'm growing a bit concerned with Melky Cabrera.  The guy was never going to repeat his numbers from the last two years, thanks to some unsustainable babips, but holy shit, does he ever look lost out there right now?  He's striking out a bit more than usual, but he isn't hitting for any power whatsoever, with a .042 ISO.  The scary thing is that there isn't really any difference in the numbers that tend to predict a bounceback-- plate discipline numbers look relatively similar to the last few years, and there's nothing about his batted ball profile that suggests that he's been unlucky.  I'm sure there's a lot of small sample noise in there, but whatever.  He's certainly had a couple of ugly swings this week, so hopefully there's a little adjustment or two to be made.  Maybe I'll go back and look at some videos of last season and see if there's anything that I notice  STEROIDS!