Yet another look at Brett Wallace. He can hit, he is big, and there are concerns about his defense. We know, we know.
“You look at what a polished hitter he was, and he was everything our scouts really advertised him as,” St. Louis general manager John Mozeliak said. “We thought he could be challenged at the Double-A level this year.”
Mozeliak said he wouldn’t be surprised if Wallace was playing for Triple-A Memphis at the end of next season.
Chris O’Leary analyzes Colby Rasmus‘ swing mechanics, and finds “a nice, short, simple, and classic left-handed swing that resembles the swings of Pete Rose, Ken Griffey Jr., Rick Ankiel, and a number of other very good left-handed hitters.”
Memphis manager Chris Maloney doesn’t expect a lot of roster turnover from this season to next.
Mitch Boggs won the PCL ERA title, for whatever that might be worth. I find that ERA can be misleading, Boggs’ FIP of 4.51 was 20th amongst pitchers with 90+ innings.
Derrick Goold has thumbnails of all the September call ups.
Tis the time of year for abbreviated DFR’s. Palm Beach started its playoffs, and Batavia is now two and a half games up on looks to be headed for a playoff berth themselves. They have four regular season games left.
Palm Beach 4, Daytona 0 (Delayed after five innings, will update when finished…update:scratch these stats, the game was postponed. Stupid rule.)
- Steve Hill smacked a pair of homers in three at-bats.
- Pete Kozma doubled.
- Charlie Kingrey went 2-2 with a double.
- Tyler Herron allowed only two hits and struck out three over four innings. He’s had a nice little rebound since being demoted.
- Jermaine Curtis and Jose Garcia swatted three doubles. Garcia stole his 25th base of the season.
- Chris Swauger went 2-5 with a double. In his last ten games Swauger is slugging .632.
- Xavier Scruggs went 2-4 with a double.
- Shane Peterson went 2-5.
- Edwin Gomez went 2-4.
- Charles Cutler went 2-4 with a walk.
- Thomas Eager allowed a run on three hits and three walks with one strikeout in five innings.
- George Brown dominated the dojo, striking out six in three innings.
- Jason Buursma allowed an unearned run on a couple of hits over an inning.
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As of right now, over on milb.com the Palm Beach game is listed as “Postponed”. Does this mean they restart it over or pick it up where it left off? If they start this game over, that BS. I don’t care if its the rule, if it is it’s a bad rule.
I don’t know if it’s different in the FSL, but I know in the PCL, no game is ever restarted. If it’s not an official game, it’s suspended and resumed.
Of course ERA title dosn’t matter because its Boggs. If Garcia or Mortensen had won it, everyone would be losing their minds. Boggs was the best pitcher in the PCL. He led in era and whip, and was voted as so by the managers in the league per baseball america.
Jaime Garcia needs TJ surgery….that was the risk you had taking a guy with a past arm injury and putting him in a new role mentally and physically late into a season.
Such a shame, but you reap what you sow
picklefork.
No way. You can’t blame Duncan for this. Having him pitch for a month in a relief role didn’t blow out the ligament. That’s ridiculous.
Not Duncan’s fault, its the org’s fault for taking a guy with past arm injuries who was on a tailored routine and putting him in a new role in a more stressful situation.
This isnt hindsight 20/20….this was discussed before the move was made…it was risky to take Garcia with his past injury history and put him into this role.
It was a move made out of desperation and as usual…..desperation leads to bad choices.
If this is true, it’s a shame, but if he needs it now it’s pretty likely that he would have needed it at some point in the near future regardless of how he was handled this year. I was surprised that he didn’t get it last year when he was shut down.
From the club’s perspective, at least they won’t be paying him 3rd or 4th-year starter money to recover, and when he comes back in ’10 or so he’ll be ready to dominate and still be very young. He’ll still probably have a good career.
I like to blame Duncan for a lot of things but Garcia’s injury was not his fault. I was surprised this was the origional result when he first hurt himself last year. Better now than the start of next season.
I think we’ve all been holding our breathe with Garcia since they shut him down last season. I don’t see where the organization handled him wrong. He’s got one of those elbows. Hope he recovers for 2010.
I am almost glad he is having such a relatively simple surgery, it could have been much worse. I was hoping to see him make the staff in 09 but now 10 looks better, but lets remember Josh Kinney’s problems coming back and don’t count on anything till 11. Garcia needs to get healthy.
Batavia’s Chris Swauger has come on strong after a slow start. August numbers: avg. .375; obp .430; slg .583; ops 1.014 in
not sure why he is still batting in the bottom third of the line up.
@ Birdswin-That’s not true at all, I for one am one of Boggs’ biggest supporters, and I might even have him ranked higher than Mortensen.
As for ERA and WHIP, those stats are highly flawed b/c they lump together a large string of individual events made by multiple players, eg the pitcher, hitter and the defense. making it extremely tough to separate the credit for the pitcher, hitter, or defense. WHIP and ERA fail to account for the actual contributions of the pitcher. Most pitchers’ ability to influence balls in play is relatively weak.
The reason why I pointed out his FIP (fielding independent pitching ERA) because those are situations he has control over. It’s a more useful estimate of a pitcher’s ability than ERA because it focuses on strikeouts, walks, hit batsman and homers, not on what his fielders did. And in Boggs case, he still had a good season, albeit not a great one. He was much better peripherally speaking than Mortensen, to be sure.
Like I said, I like Boggs. He makes all his starts, has a pretty nasty sinker but has inconsistent secondary stuff. If he could hone his curve and change up, I think he’ll be a very solid #4 starter.
As I said back at the end of July, Jaime Garcia’s mechanics suck..
- http://www.chrisoleary.com/projects/Baseball/Pitching/ProfessionalPitcherAnalyses/JaimeGarcia.html
Just to play devil’s advocate Chris, you also said you loved the mechanics of Kopp and Lynn, and both of those guys are now on the shelf, and from what I understand Kopp’s situation could be serious (labrum)
While I’m following the Kopp situation with some interest, the issue is that not all of his problems are necessarily due to things that happened on the field (which confounds things). I also know that at various points (at the college and pro level) people have tried to tweak Kopp’s mechanics in order to get a few more MPH out of him. This can easily lead to timing and other problems. He may no longer be the pitcher that he was back in the Spring of 2007.
I have some video of Kopp from March that I need to take a look at.
When I saw him then he was hitting 92 or 93 but with poor control. He had to back off to 90 or 91 to throw strikes. It could be that the effort to hit 93 pushed him over the edge either in terms of his mechanics (e.g. timing) or what his body can handle.
The issue with Lynn is that he’s never pitched this much, this hard in his life. Many guys hit bumps in the road after pitching a full college season and then playing in the pro Summer (and Winter) leagues. He could be dealing with fatigue problems.
I’m monitoring both of them.
No, that’s good info Chris. I am pretty angry if that is true about Kopp, he was a favorite of mine and your analysis confirmed why. Now this. Ugh.
As for Lynn, I figured it was a fatigue thing. Again, just playing devil’s advocate, as I’m sure it was a question that was in a lot of the readers’ heads.
“Again, just playing devil’s advocate, as I’m sure it was a question that was in a lot of the readers’ heads.”
I don’t think I have all the answers, so those were questions in my own head and that led me to try to get the full story on Kopp.
One difference between Kopp and Maddux that I’m not sure is significant is that Kopp’s elbow is bent 90 degrees at the high-cocked position while Maddux’s is bent more like 135 degrees. I’m not yet convinced that that is significant, but you could argue that a 90 degree bend in the elbow at the high-cocked position, while widely advocated, isn’t ideal because it could theoretically increase the load on both the elbow and the shoulder.
That’s too bad about Garcia.
As for Wallace, I hope the Cards leave Brett Wallace at AA for most of next season, no matter what kind of numbers he puts up. Then come August promote him to AAA and possibly a September callup depending on how well he is doing. Have Allen Craig start out the year in AA in LF and then in May promote him to AAA. That would make David Freese the odd man out and he would either be on the bench or traded for another prospect.