Let's take a relaxed opinion towards work and watch the baseball match

"The Nie Mets are my favorite squadron."

Hey, so that was kind of a sweep.  Of the evil bastard Yankees, no less.  And now the Mets are in town.  And they're supposed to suck.  Other than a few Seinfeld and Simpsons references, that's pretty well all I have for you, since I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to the National League, save for the Nats, Giancarlo Stanton and Andrew Mccutchen.

Jose Bautista gets a Zaunhead for his game last night, though again, multiple people could have qualified, namely, Yan Gomes for a 2-for-3 in his MLB debut, or JP Arencibia for being responsible for those two important runs to make it 4-1, instead of 2-1.  Drew Hutchison did a nice job as well, going 6 innings and holding a potent Yankees lineup in check.

Of course, that would have quite possibly been a 3-1 lead (or more) if Rajai Davis didn't suck at bunting, if Ben Francisco didn't suck at baserunning, and John Farrell didn't suck at not calling for bunts.

Ricky Romero pitches tonight for the Jays, and he'll go against the guy that I wanted AA to acquire this offseason, Jon Niese.  Niese, of course, signed an extension with the Mets, making it really unlikely that he gets traded within the next couple of seasons.  The Mets have been surprising so far this year, but I can't see it holding up, considering I can't honestly say that I've ever heard of half their lineup.

Stuff
Fangraphs shits on Adam Lind.

Vlad Guerrero might be closer to coming back than first thought.

Roy Oswalt threw for the Red Sox and Phillies, which is kind of Blue Jays new, I guess.  They could go get Oswalt if they really wanted to, and the Red Sox getting him would mean that the Jays would have to face him (maybe).  Whatever.

Tango looks at shifts (linking to Bill James Online).

David Wright will sit out tomorrow's game, according to Terry Collins, according to according to Adam Rubin of ESPN.

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

Romero P

Metros
Torres CF
Turner 1B
Wright 3B
Duda DH
Murphy 2B
Hairston LF
Nieuwenhuis RF
Johnson C
Cedeno SS

Niese P

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.

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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

Yankee time

The Jays are going to get Hiroki Kuroda and the Yankees tonight in the opener of their two-game set.  Kyle Drabek goes for the Jays... more on him in a second.

Kuroda spent his whole MLB career with the Dodgers until becoming a free agent after the 2011 season.  He came over to the States for the 2008 season at the age of 33, zipping over from Japan, and pitching pretty well for the Dodgers over 4 seasons.  Of course, that was in the NL West, and in a pitcher-friendly park/league.

Kuroda signed with the Yankees as a free agent this offseason, inking a 1-year, $10MM deal.  He's been okay this year, I guess, if you ignore his really bad debut, and his really bad third start.  The league switch has definitely been a bit tough on him, and I'm sure Yankee Stadium has a little something to do with that, but his peripherals aren't great.  He's outperformed his fip and xfip dramatically to this point, his k/9 is down by 2 full strikeouts, his walk rate is up by a full walk, and his fastball velocity is down by 1.5 MPH (though he's throwing more sliders and fewer 4-seamers, so that could make sense).

The Jays outrighted Trystan Magnusson to Dunedin (High-A), which removes him from the 40-man roster.  It seems like everybody is calling this a reaction to Brett Lawrie getting suspended and the Jays needing a replacement, but that simply isn't accurate, from what I can tell.  Not only has Lawrie not been suspended (yet, anyway), but he'll be allowed to appeal that suspension and continue playing until his hearing, which needs to be done in person at the MLB offices in New York.  The Jays don't go to New York until after the all-star break, which apparently means that if he is indeed suspended, assuming he appeals, his suspension won't be served until some time in July.  I don't know how legit that is, for the record, and don't really have anyway to confirm or disconfirm such news, but I'd say Wilner knows more than I do about this kind of thing.

Suspensions can be appealed in #MLB - don't take effect until after the appeal is heard. It'll be months before Lawrie has to sit. #bluejays
— Mike Wilner (@Wilnerness590) May 16, 2012

This seems pretty outrageous to me, and maybe if they just say "Hey, 1 game and a cash fine" he'll just accept it or something.  And it's not like they're half a country away from New York-- they're in Toronto, so I can't really see why the don't just send him on an offday or on the way to/from Boston or Baltimore or whatever.  Basically, "I don't know", is what I'm trying to say.  Lawrie is in the lineup tonight though, so take that however you'd like.  I've heard that the league announces suspensions, but not fines, for the record.

Anyway, what I think the Magnusson thing really means is that someone is going to get added to the 40-man and called up to the bigs in the next day or two.  Perhaps a starter?  To take over for Kyle Drabek?  Who can't throw strikes?  And needs to go back down to AAA to figure out his mechanical inconsistencies or learn that he has a mid-90's fastball and knee-bending curve that can just get batters out so you don't have to fucking nibble?  Deck Mcguire, perhaps?  Or maybe they found a trade partner to score a 1B/DH and get Adam Lind the fuck outta here.

I'm basing this on entirely nothing, but if that whole thing about the suspension not taking place right away is real, then there's no need for a knee-jerk DFA, and I doubt that this is anything more than a coincidence that Lawriegate happened on the same day as this roster move.

Stuff
Check in with Pete Rose, who lives in Las Vegas, of all places.  Semi-related, ESPN is doing a bunch of "30 for 30" shorts, and this is one of the first ones.  Here's hoping they do a bunch more.

Joe Torre doesn't think Lawrie did it on purpose, which is probably good news.

Turf.  No Jeter tonight.  Sorry ladies.  The Jays counter with an offday for Yunel Escobar, a DH day for Adam Lind, and a 2-hole for Eric Thames and his .308 OBP.  Your move, Yankees.

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

Drabek P


Yankees
Granderson CF
Swisher RF
Cano 2B
Rodriguez 3B
Teixeira 1B
Ibanez LF
Chavez DH
Martin C
Nix SS (Haha, what?)

Kuroda P

Jose Molina Strikes Again!

[Note: Jose Molina had nothing to do with this, maybe except for the fact that he may have been in the vicinity at the time of the incident in question]

So yeah.  If you somehow missed it, Lawrie took a 3-1 fastball (#5) outside and began walking to 1st, only for umpire Bill Miller to call a late strike.  Lawrie reacted the way most people would at a questionable and late call, and slowly walked back to the box.  Lawrie then took a high change-up (#6) for ball 5 strike 2 strike 3 and ended up losing his shit at Miller for spite-ringing him up.

That Jose Molina sure can frame a pitch in the 9th inning!  And really, that's probably all we'd hear if Lawrie didn't go all Jon Rauch.

Anyway, this would have just pretty well blown over had the helmet not hit Bill Miller, but uhhh.... not so much.  It didn't look to me as if he was intentionally throwing the helmet at him, because why the fuck would you bounce it instead of just straight up biffing it at your target, but whatever.  There are a few angles of the incident out there and, to me, he was just throwing it to the ground without really giving a shit of where it was headed afterwards.

Buster Olney of ESPN (retardedly, imo) uses the Delmon Young incident of 2006, where Young struck out in a similar fashion to Lawrie, and then threw his bat at the umpire from the on-deck circle area.  These are two entirely different situations, based on the intent, but Olney thinks that Lawrie will probably get 8-10 games (Young got 50).

Umpires get evaluated all the time by the MLB for the purpose of having their best umpires calling the playoffs, and I'd be surprised if this piece of shit even gets considered.  At least he got what he deserved.  That beer cost like $14, and they stop serving in the 7th inning, so getting hit with that beer is like the perfect storm of shit.  Too bad it missed his face. (Zaunhead to that fan, by the way).  Oh yeah, but don't throw shit on the field.

Edwin gets a Zaunhead too for his homerun off Price.

Ooph

Just one bad inning, I guess.  A really, really bad inning, granted, but one bad inning nonetheless.  It really just appeared that nothing was going right for the Jays all night long-- whether it was the number of close calls that went the other way (I'm talking about bang-bang plays at 1st, the ball that landed on the line in LF that got called foul, or the odd ball/strike call), but those games happen all the time.  I'd like to talk mostly about that one dirty bastard of an inning though.

Source: FanGraphs

The Jays entered the 5th inning with a 63.2% chance of winning, by virtue of the 1-0 score.  Brandon Morrow, to that point, had allowed 0 hits, striking out 6 and walking 3.  Standard Morrow performance, really.  I don't think anybody really believed that he was going to get away with never walking anybody again the way he did in those 3 starts or whatever.

Will Rhymes lead the 5th off with an 0-2 double in to the corner, which was fielded gracefully by Eric Thames in left field.  After a Chris Gimenez sac fly, moving Rhymes to 3rd, Elliott Johnson knocked a run in with a single, so far so good.  Ben Zobrist reached on a groundball to second, where Johnson busted up a double play (kind of).  BJ Upton walked to get runners on first and second, before the wheels fell off.  Adam Lind booted a groundball, which allowed Ben Zobrist to alertly score from 2nd.  Morrow covered first for the clumsy fake first baseman and got upset when the close play went the other way.

JP Arencibia couldn't handle strike 3 to Carlos Pena, which allowed the runners to advance and the inning to continue.  Luke Scott and Sean Rodriguez followed up with hits to score the 4th, 5th and 6th runs to score, before Will Rhymes flied out to end the inning.  In total, the Jays' win expectancy dropped from 63.2% to 8.3% in an inning that featured a single earned run.  Morrow escaped the game with the loss, and a WPA of -.366, despite bringing a no-hitter in to the 5th inning.

Baseball is certainly a game in which you need to make your opponents pay for their mistakes, and the Rays did exactly that to the Blue Jays last night.  It is really, really difficult to win a game in which you give the opponent 5 outs in an inning, especially a team as good as Tampa.  Morrow really did deserve better.  He obviously gave up the hits and walks in that 5th inning, but the defense didn't exactly help him out a whole lot in terms of getting out of the inning without seeing the Rays get a crooked number on the scoreboard, or throwing a pitch in the 6th, for that matter.

Speaking of mistakes, Adam Lind is still on this team, and is hurting the club with his defense now too.  Spectacular.

The silver lining is that the Rays used 6 pitchers yesterday, and if the Jays can get the Rays in to the bullpen today, we might see a blowout or at least some shitballing.  The Rays will play the Red Sox after the Jays, so they'll hopefully have a taxed bullpen (assuming we're cheering for whoever leads the ALE to lose games, for the Jays' sake).

Anyway, the Jays didn't really bother scoring runs or anything throughout the rest of the game, so it doesn't really matter a whole lot either way.  Kelly Johnson was 2-for-5 and that's about the end of it.  I'll go ahead and give Morrow the Zaunhead, I guess, since nobody else went out of their way to earn one and I'm a big Morrow apologist.  He really should have been out of that inning at some point before the last of the 6 runs scored, which fucks around with his pitch totals and whatnot, so the -.366WPA doesn't really tell the whole story and it's kind of tough to give negative WPA to anybody but the pitcher when the fielders fuck him around, so meh.

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Henderson Alvarez pitches tonight against David Price, which kind of fucks with my plan of taxing the bullpen. Alvarez was supposed to be the subject of a Jeff Sullivan piece on SBNation today (yesterday?), but Brett Lawrie just kind of weaseled his way in to it.  Cliffnotes: Lawrie is pretty good at defense, as are the other Jays infielders, and that's helped out Alvarez (and other Jays pitchers) quite a bit so far this year.

RJ Anderson looks at Kyle Drabek for baseball prospectus (behind a paywall).  Basically, Drabek has the stuff to be a big league pitcher, he just isn't one yet because he's wild as fuck and has some pretty big mechanical flaws holding him back.  He says it better, and says more than that, but that's really the main jist of it.  Just read it to see what I mean.

Nowhere Plans' MLB Power rankings are up.  The Sports Illustrated ones are up too, which happen to place the Jays in 28th of 30 teams.  That's obviously retaded, and Tango looks closer to figure out how that can happen.

Joe Posnanski takes an interesting look at the early struggles of Albert Pujols.

Jeff Niemann is probably going to miss a few months after taking an Adam Lind liner to the leg and fracturing his fibula.  Adam Lind literally destroys Niemann.

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

Alvarez P

Rays
Zobrist RF
Upton CF
Joyce LF
Pena 1B
Scott DH
Rodriguez 3B
Rhymes 2B
Molina C
Johnson SS

Price P

Big thumbs up to me for having this all written out literally two hours ago and not posting it.

Jays Rays

So they're in town.  No Evan Longoria, a healthy dose of Jeff Niemann, and a Jose Bautista who appears to be swinging the bat like the Jose we know.  We'll get Brandon Morrow tonight, too, so that's pretty good.  And the game starts in like 40 seconds so let's get this out of the way, no?

Jeff Niemann pitches for the Rays tonight, as mentioned, which pretty much means that Adam Lind will go 2-for-3 with a walk and a homer.  On a related note, Lind will bat 4th tonight.  Lind absolutely destroys Niemann, as far as his career goes.  I mentioned this last time Niemann started against the Jays, and then read it again earlier today, but there's no time and I lost it, but Lind is hitting something like .419 with 3 HR's in 42 AB's for his career against Jeff.  Spare thoughts on the situation:  Edwin will move to the 5-hole, for some reason, and nobody else in the lineup ever gets small-sample-size preferential treatment.  Whatever.

Edwin gets yesterday's Zaunhead for going 3-for-4 and leading the Jays in WPA by a country mile.  Again, the Jays didn't get a single walk, while Ricky Romero walked 5 over 5.1IP (Carreno walked 3 over his 1.2IP as well).


Stuff

Joel Carreno has been sent back to AA New Hampshire, and Evan Crawford was recalled.  The Jays claim that they would like more lefties for the upcoming Rays and Yankees series'.  I doubt he's going to get a whole lot of action, but a bunch of Rays and Yankees are struggling mightily this season vs. LHP's, apparently.  Hat tip to probably Stoeten for that little piece of info.

Gregor Chisolm (@gregorMLB) gave us a lot today on his twitter.  Among his notes:

• Dustin McGowan threw lightly today.  Still a ways to go before coming back, but he's ahead of schedule.
• Sergio Santos threw from 90 feet today, and will stretch it out a bit over the next few days.  He has no immediate timetable for his return, but it shouldn't be too long.
• Vladimir Guerrero will report to extended spring training tomorrow, if he didn't do so already.
• Carreno is going back to the rotation in AA, as opposed to the bullpen role he's been filling when in Toronto.
• Farrell was disappointed with .500 on the road trip against a weak schedule.  "We're a better team than that."  I personally don't think it's a disaster, but against the teams they played, anything less than 5-5 would have been a pretty big disaster, in my view.

Apparently Brett Lawrie is one of the best fielders ever?  Let's not lose our minds here, 76 games in to his career or whatever.  I'm pretty certain that anything less than 3 years of defensive metrics is more of less useless in terms of sample size, but hey, we can dream.

High fives!

Kyle at driveline baseball wants you to tell your little leaguers to keep the ball up in the zone, at least until they get to the big leagues.

The Rays placed Desmond Jennings on the 15-day DL today.  Good, nice and banged up.

Lineups
Jays

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

Morrow P

Rays

Zobrist RF
Upton CF
Joyce LF
Pena 1B
Scott DH
Rodriguez 3B
Rhymes 2B
Gimenez C
Johnson SS

Niemann P

Bautista Appears to be Back

So yeah, he's good at baseball again and everyone's happy.

I got drunk last night and forgot to Tivo the game, so I didn't exactly see anything other than the highlights.  I could have watched "Jays in 30" or whatever it's called, but Will Ferrell hosted Saturday Night Live last night, and it was truly awesome.  I'd go watch that if I were you.

As result of not seeing the game, I probably shouldn't comment on the fact that the Jays took 0 walks and struck out 9 times against P.J. Walters and the Minnesota pitching staff.  I mean, Brian Duensing is quite literally un-rosterable in at least 25 MLB systems.  I can only assume that Jays hitters saw Walters and just said "Holy fuck.  I'm going to crush everything." and just swung at a whole bunch of shitty pitches or something, and I'll probably just have to live with that opinion based on nothing.

It appears that Hutch did okay.  I'd really like to see him walk fewer people, especially against an offense as anemic as the Twins, but what can you do?

I'd really like to see the Jays fucking clobber the Twins at least once (i.e. today, please) the way they really should.  I'm not going to go out and say that the Jays should outright sweep the Twins in a 4-game set, because that's not really a realistic expectation, especially with the back end of the Jays' rotation getting the first three games of the series, but yeah.  This team should probably win a blowout against the Twins at least once in 4 games.  Having said all that, I really do expect Ricky Romero to go out there today and throw a 2-hitter.

Pink bats!

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

Romero P

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

Diamond P