"You Suck?" That's what your mother said last night Trabek

Yeah, if Drabek Kant* get out of the 5th inning against the Minnesota god damned Twins, I'm not sure what his use is, and he's probably never going to develop in to any kind of useful pitcher until this kind of control issue is figured out anyway, so how's about we just zip him right on down to Vegas and Halladay his mechanics and curveball, huh?

I mean, you guys thought Brett Cecil looked bad [sidenote: Brett Cecil looked pretty bad, and probably worse than Drabesy, but that doesn't matter].  Drabek just looked like a complete abortion out there last night, and I'd give him some kind of pass if he had actually looked good in any of his other starts over the last month, but the fact that he just misses the zone with every other pitch just lets opposing batters kind of stand there and take a couple pitches until all of a sudden, the second inning is over and Drabek's thrown 64 pitches or whatever it was.

Like I've said before, the last couple years, this kind of thing could happen-- let people learn what they need to learn in the bigs, let old relievers get their type-B status, give Adam Lind 600 shitty AB's to see if he can do something with the 50 good ones, etc.  This year, I don't think we can really justify not losing our minds when Drabek is going wild, or when Lind is as bad or worse than he's ever been while batting in the 4-hole. Other AL East teams aren't going to keep losing their starting CF, or allowing the Orioles to sweep them forever, so we've got to take advantage while the getting is good.

Drabek to AAA to either straighten out, or to become a reliever, please.  Villanueva can start, so can Carreno.  There are other youngsters down there, and Matt Garza is probably available.  Make it happen.

Stuff


*: My neighbor stopped by this morning (fucking early too, btw) to ask if the wifi network at my apartment is called "Cunt Salad".  "Yes," I told him, proudly, with a smile on my face.  "Well, my 8-year old daughter was on her iPhone this morning looking for internet, and asked me what cunt is.  Please change that." My network is now called "Kant Salad".

Jose hit two taters last night, so he's absolutely 100% good as new again, and will be an offensive force for the rest of the season.  Know how I know?  I have the internet.  He gets last night's Zaunhead.

John Axford blew a save last night, his first in like 50 attempts or something.  He trolled the media real nice too.

Apparently the Jays' whole bullpen is "battered and broken".  I figured that they meant that Coco sucks and Santos is hurt, but I guess the whole damn thing sucks!  What's worse is that this is the last word on sports, so you're not allowed to call them retarded for being retarded and using arbitrary endpoints over a 26 games sample size!

Lineups
Jays
It's not posted yet, and I'm going to go drink a bunch of beer, so I'm guessing.

Johnson 2B
Escobar SS
Bautista RF
Edwin DH
Thames LF
Lawrie 3B
Rasmus CF
Lind 1B
Mathis C

Hutch P


Twins
Span CF
Dozier SS
Mauer C
Willingham LF
Doumit DH
Plouffe 3B
Parmelee 1B
Mastroianni RF
Carroll 2B

Walters P

Buzzer Beater

Was really going to try and rush this one before the game got underway, but it looks like we're getting some kind of rain delay scenario, with the tarp going on the infield literally 2 minutes ago.  It looks like there are thunderstorms in the forecast, which pretty well means doubleheader tomorrow.  Doubleheaders usually mean that lineups get watered down, which, in my uneducated opinion, would increase the variance. In other words, watered down lineups should make it easier for the shitty old Twins to steal a game from the Jays.

And that, folks, is all I've got for you.

Lineups
Jays
Johnson 2B
Escobar SS
Bautista RF
Edwin DH
Thames LF
Lawrie 3B
Rasmus CF
Lind 1B
JPA C

Drabek T (thrower)

Twins
Span CF
Dozier SS
Mauer C
Willingham LF
Doumit DH
Plouffe 3B
Parmelee 1B
Mastroianni RF
Carroll 2B

Blackburn P

Free Money

Boy, them Twins are a tough group to play against, huh?  You just never know what you're going to see next.  I mean this in terms of having a hard time knowing just how badly they're going to fuck up, or what basic fundamental of baseball they're going to butcher next, when you least expect it.

Edwin Encarnacion was probably the main benefactor of the whole Minnesota "defense" fiasco, getting two free RBI's that he didn't really do anything for, the first on a routine groundball to short that Yunel Escobar just decided to score on, and the second on a popup in to the Bermuda Triangle area between the pitcher's mound and home plate, where people have struggled to defend dating back to the glory days of Ruth and Mantle.

If we can ignore Jose Bautista's new-found ability to still not get on base anymore, and Adam Lind's shittiness in general, the Jays offensive output was pretty awesome last night.  Brett Lawrie hit the ball hard a few times, and more or less put the game out of reach in the first inning and also happened to take two bases on a passed ball (thanks Ryan Doumit!), Colby Rasmus went 2-for-3 with a walk, and Yunel Escobar got on base 5 times, including 4 hits.

All of these items kind of overshadowed another pretty good outing from Henderson Alvarez, who threw 7 reasonably good innings, though the control wasn't quite what we've come to expect.  He walked 3 and struck out two, but of course, with Alvarez, we're looking more for groundballs, and less at the K:BB ratio.  We'd still like the K rate to come up (i.e. develop another pitch that isn't a fastball), but 14 groundballs against 1 line drive will certainly play.

I know I've written about this exact thing before, but again, I don't see how Alvarez can maintain this kind of performance.  SSS, but a babip of .212 and a strand rate over 87% just aren't sustainable stats, so the ERA will definitely rise.  The groundballs, double plays, and shifts could conceivably help keep his babip and strand rates stay above league average to a certain degree, I just hope he keeps working on stuff like finding a swing-and-miss secondary pitch or something, because you don't get to play Minnesota and Seattle very often.  I am glad that they're taking advantage of these games against the drivel teams though.

Speaking of getting starts against drivel, Kyle Drabek gets the ball against Minnesota.  He has been just fair in his last couple of starts, missing gloves and throwing strikes and balls at a pretty equal pace.  He really does need a game against a garbage lineup like this Minnesota one, and hopefully he just slams pitches straight in to the zone and lets them swing and miss.  I'd love to say that I have a lot of faith in Drabek as a major league pitcher going forward, but until he shows me that he can pound the zone and not miss absolutely everything down and away to righties, I'll not have that opinion.  I'd feel absolutely fine with moving Drabek to the bullpen or minors when Mcgowan and/or Cecil come back, or when the Jays acquire Matt Garza in a few weeks.

Stuff
Notgraphs is going crazy with the Bluejays content so far today.  Brett Lawrie twitter nonsense, and Sergio Santos party's hard.  This works nicely with the Fangraphs take on Vlad Guerrero.

Ricky Romero was on the MLB Network yesterday talking about a bunch of stuff like baseball, basketball, his dog, and twitter.

 

Apparently the Jays have checked in with the Phillies about the availability of Shane Victorino and Cole Hamels.  The Phillies don't expect to be sellers this year, according to Ruben Amaro Jr., GM of the sinking ship that is the Phillies franchise, but he's said that he's got to at least be mindful and keep certain doors open.  Both players are free agents after the season, and if neither gets extended, a trade could happen.  Victorino would be an upgrade over Eric Thames, and could send Jose Bautista to 1B to jettison Adam Lind from the lineup.  Hamels would instantly become the best pitcher on the Jays staff, and would be a very welcome addition for a playoff stretch if the Jays are still hanging around a few months down the road.

Jays Sign Vlad Guerrero, It Isn't 2002

Ken Rosenthal of FOX sports is reporting that the Jays have signed 37-year outfielder DH guy Vlad Guerrero to a minor-league deal worth a pro-rated $1.3MM.  Guerrero is a career .318/.379/.518 hitter over 2147 games, and was useful as recently as two years ago with Texas.  Last year, he had a .290/.317/.416 slash line with the Orioles as a DH over 145 games.  I'm not exactly sure why he hadn't signed somewhere already this offseason, but heh, what can you do?

I assume that Guerrero will be used as a not-Ben Francisco alternative if he gets to the big league roster, as in he'll DH when Edwin plays 1B and Lind sits, and sit on the bench when Edwin DH's.  Obviously, Omar Vizquel's career as a pinch-hitter in game-on-the-line situations is nearing an end, as Vlad has a career .322/.400/.572 slash line against lefties.

All things considered, this is a pretty low-risk situation for the Jays.

On to tonight's action against the Twinkies.  It's going to be the battle of the 1:1 K:BB ratios-- Henderson Alvarez will pitch for the Jays, against Jason Marquis.

Former Jay Darin Mastroianni looks like he'll get at least one game, which will allow him to extend his proverbial cup of coffee. Such an event shows you how terrible the Twins are, though I think Denard Span's injury-ish is the real meaning of that call-up.  Span ran in to a fence and missed a game the other day, so we'll see how they monitor that.  The Twins, even beyond Span, are fighting some injury troubles.  They lost Justin Morneau last week to a DL stint, and Alexi Casilla is banged up as well.  Beyond that, Danny Valencia has been terrible so far this year and was sent to the minors, and Francisco Liriano was relegated to the bullpen.  Another former Jay, PJ Walters, is expected to start Sunday's game in Liriano's place.  Pretty upset that Brian Dinkleman isn't starting this one.

Stuff
David Robertson's era as a setup man?  Something like 2.85, maybe a bit less.  Robertson's ERA as a closer?  54.00.  Clearly, he doesn't have the closer's mentality.  Casey Janssen, on the other hand, has himself a career 3.84 ERA (combined, as a starter and reliever), but is perfect (!) as a closer.  0 blown saves as a closer, 0 hits, 0 walks, 0 runs, and a 33% strikeout rate.  Janssen>Robertson.

Janssen's never made a batter do this as a closer though:

It appears that the MLB is at least considering outlawing the old "Step to third, throw to first" trick, which sounds just fantastic to me.

Lineups
Jays
Johnson 2B
Escobar SS
Bautista RF
Edwin 1B
Thames LF
Lawrie 3B
Rasmus CF
Lind 1B
JPA C

Hendy P


Twins
Span CF
Dozier SS
Mauer 1B
Willingham DH
Doumit C
Plouffe 3B
Komatsu RF
Mastroianni LF
Casilla 2B

Marquis P

Thanks Heavens for Oakland

It's a rare privilege to get to play the Oakland A's every now and then, especially when they don't have their starting center fielder or catcher in the lineup due to injury.  I feel like Morrow probably wouldn't have fared quite as well against a team with any kind of reasonable offensive skills, because he was definitely a bit wild yesterday.  Probably a blood sugar issue, amirite?

Morrow threw like 112 pitches or something over just 6 innings, a number that was helped severely by a perfect 6th.  To the A's credit, they realized that he was a bit wild and allowed Morrow to inflate his own pitch count by getting deep in to pretty well every count, and 4 walks obviously helped.  Those were Morrow's first walks in 3 starts, and the run he allowed was the first in 23 innings pitched.  Even without his best stuff, he went out there and threw 6 innings of 1-run ball, ultimately striking out 10 batters, which is enough for a Zaunhead.  We owe Kelly Johnson one for Tuesday's game as well.

And wouldn't you know it?  John Farrell really deserves some credit for shuffling the lineup at just the right time to get Adam Lind and Edwin Encarnacion going again!  Most of us would have moved Lind down in the order 8 months ago, put Edwin in the 4-hole immediately to start the season, and taken Coco out of the closer's role before he even got put there, but he had the forethought of realizing that none of that shit would have worked until last night.  That's why being a major league manager is the hardest job in the world.  Now the big question is whether or not Farrell can properly stick Lind back in to the 4-hole without making him bad at hitting again.

The Jays will now head to Minnesota to face the Morneau-less, worst-team-in-baseball Twins for a quick series, before returning home and hitting a tough stretch on the schedule.  More on that later.

*One of the paragraphs in this post is entirely sarcastic.  Make a game out of figuring out which one it is.*

Proven Closer!

Preface: I wrote this at work today, but couldn't post it due to the profanity filter on all of the computers there and my lack of knowledge on how to turn them off on any browser that isn't IE8.  Fuck IE8.  I wrote this on Firefox from like 8:40 until 9, and again took a look during my lunch break.  Just in case this looks exactly like every other Jays Blogger's rant, which I'm sure it does, it's original material.

This is getting a bit old, no?  I mean, this kind of thing was alright last year and the year before because it was worth the risk to go out and sign old guys who just happen to be garbage, since either a) someone would give up a prospect for him at the deadline, or b) he'd turn in to a draft pick after the season.  I suppose the former is still possible with some kind of reasonable performance (i.e. one that would be a complete surprise, and not the turd that we've gotten so far THAT WE KNEW WE WERE GOING TO GET), but the fact that management can't turn relievers in to draft picks anymore the way they did with Rauch and Francisco last year grossly removes value from a reliever.

This shit just doesn't fly anymore.  The reward of keeping him around all year isn't anywhere near as high, and this team needs to eke out every win they can, since they're no longer in rebuild mode, but rather, are entering contention mode.  You need to win your fair share of games against shitty teams like Oakland, especially when their best offensive player is out of the lineup, because fuck knows that other competing teams are going to beat up on them.

If you're retarded, you might not know that I'm talking about Francisco Cordero, proven closer of the Toronto Blue Jays, though I'm sure half of the retards out there could have probably figured this one out.

You see, Coco hasn't exactly been good so far this year, especially as the closer, since Sergio Santos went down.  In 12 appearances this season, he has exactly one clean appearance, in which he's given up 0 baserunners, and an astonishing seven appearances in which he's allowed one or more runs to score.  Not exactly closing the door.

It doesn't take a fucking rocket appliance to figure out that you probably shouldn't put a guy in to a situation where the game is on the line if he allows runs in half of his 1-inning-or-less appearances.  Oh, but christ, he's been a closer for the last 11 years! Newsflash: that's probably why he's cum now.  He's 37 years old and he doesn't throw anywhere near as hard as he used to when he was useful.  It would be nice to nip this one in the bud, before everybody goes jumping off the fucking bridges about this shit, but apparently we don't get that luxury.  If we really want him closing out games (and we don't, but play along), at least have him throw the ball well in a low-leverage situation before throwing him in there.

I don't know whose fucking job it is to go tell Farrell to put literally anybody but Coco in there when the game is on the line, but someone needs to be slapped.  Remember that time in like 2009 when Frasor was closing games for most of the season?  If you really need someone who has closed before (which you don't, by the way), look no further.

And I think that's the most frustrating thing.  Jason Frasor, as boring as he is to watch, has been a pretty damn good reliever over the last  few years, striking out about a batter an inning, and getting a lot of groundballs.  Casey Janssen has regressed pretty heavily when compared to last year's performance but is still a fucking mile better than Cordero.  Luis Perez has been the absolute balls all year long.  Shit, Darren Oliver is actually pretty good against both righties and lefties.  But isntead, when the games on the line, these guys sit on the bench gathering dust while Coco blows it over and over again.  It's not like these guys aren't going to blow a save here and there, because that happens all the time, but at least these guys aren't getting chance after chance to fail just because of some selection bias that Player X "can close games" while Player Y can't.

[Like 3 hours after I wrote, but didn't post, this little rant, I get home to realize that Casey Janssen has been named the Jays interim closer.  That should have happened about 2 weeks ago, when Santos went down.  DFA Coco.  The following is a copy/paste smattering of  Barry Davis tweets:

At least for now, Casey Janssen is the new #bluejays closer
Farrell says he met with Cordero this morning and he fully understands the decisions. #bluejays
Farrell says he also met with JP about the move to pinch hit for him with Vizquel last night. Understands why it would upset JP.
No word yet on closer but Farrell has finally made the move with Lind. He is hitting 8th today. Edwin is new cleanup guy.

It may have taken a 5-run disaster inning, but it appears that somebody spoke to Farrell and fixed this whole fucking kerfuffle.  And really, if your 1B is batting 8th in your lineup, you've either got an amazing lineup, an outrageous defensive 1B, or it's time to get a new slugger.]

As for the little pinch-hitting nonsense from last night; yeah it was stupid, but it's not like JPA is that much better a hitter than Vizquel is.  The only thing I really have against the whole thing was the fact that JP is your 26-year old catcher, so you should probably show a little more confidence in him and let that break the tie.

There are certainly a lot more retarded managerial decisions that happen over the course of a day, so I'm not really going to get all up in arms about that one.  You can get your righty-lefty splits out, or talk about the bunt or the staying out of a double play all you want, and I can kind of live with the fact that some people still choose to think that these are reasonable ways to go about your business late in a game (and I assume that's what the rationale was), because really, the whole idea in that spot is to get one run, and then add on whatever you can afterwards.  If Vizquel lays down a nice bunt and gets a run in (and Coco doesn't shit himself on the mound), I doubt we hear a whole hell of a lot about this.

Morrow will take on the A's B-team, pretty much.  Morrow, a shit lineup, and a flyball haven... this should be good.

Lineups
Jays
Johnson 2B
Escobar SS
Bautista RF
Edwin DH
Thames LF
Lawrie 3B
Rasmus CF
Lind 1B
Arencibia C

Morrow P

A's
Weeks 2B
Pennington SS
Reddick CF
Gomes LF
Smith RF
Kaaihue DH
Inge 3B
Barton 1B
Recker C

Ross P

I Just Saw The Avengers

You should go see the Avengers.  It was good, and really quite funny.

Speaking of Avenging things, the Jays have lost two straight games, and Ricky Romero is going to go remedy that situation.  Brandon McCarthy was supposed to start for the A's tonight, but he's suffering from some kind of shoulder soreness, and probably won't pitch again until sometime next week.  Instead, we'll get to see Jarrod Parker, and tomorrow we'll get Tyson Ross, who is a good pick-up in MLB '11 The Show, though I can't comment on the '12 version since I've never gone out and traded for him since I play mostly in Road to the Show mode.

Speaking of which, in my current RTTS as a pitcher, I got drafted by the Jays (go figure, right?) and we're right around the all-star break, where virtual-Alex Anthopoulos has gone crazy trading relievers for useful pieces.  Most realistic video game in the world.

Stuff
I've got AA on Brady and Lang this morning, where he talks about Edwin and Adam Lind.  At least AA realizes that Lind has sucked for the last little while, and, assuming Farrell can be convinced, I'm taking this as a sort of "light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel" kind of thing.  Obviously, Lind is still batting 4th tonight.

I've also got Dirk Hayhurst on Sportsnet radio this morning, telling a couple got stories about beaning guys.  Dirk is pretty consistently awesome, and this is no exception.

Kevin Goldstein of baseball prospectus tells us that Brett Cecil will start tomorrow night in AA.  He was on the DL with a groin issue.

In news that actually isn't news, the Arizona Diamondbacks are said to be coveting JP Arencibia and/or Travis d'Arnaud as a backup plan for this coming offseason when they (in all likelihood) don't re-sign Miguel Montero, according to Ken Rosenthal.  Naturally, the Jays aren't going to move d'Arnaud since he's the catcher of the future, and they're not going to move JPA because he's the catcher of the present.  JP would probably fetch a decent haul is a power-hitting, 26 year old catcher with 4+ years of team control left, but that's not going to happen yet, and might not happen at all.

Umm, remember when Kelly Johnson came out of the game in like the 7th or 8th inning in Saturday's game? Apparently he was sore due to cramping and dehydration, so they just kind of took him out as a precaution. Nothing to worry about there, I suppose.

Lineups
Jays
Escobar SS
Johnson 2B
Bautista RF
Lind 1B
Edwin DH
Thames LF
Lawrie 3B
Rasmus CF
JPA C

Romero P

A's
Weeks 2B
Pennington SS
Reddick RF
Gomes DH
Inge 3B
Smith CF*
Suzuki C
Barton 1B
Taylor LF

Parker P

*Cespedes is a late scratch with a sore wrist.