Show #143: The Lineup Debate Continues

Peter from capitolavenueclub.com joins the conversation on the lineup and Fredi Gonzalez’s start at the helm.  Also, Freeman improves while Hanson and Beachy go the other way.[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.atlantabaseballtalk.com/show-143-the-lineup-debate-continues/

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Chavez lifts A-Rod-less Yanks by Rangers (AP)

Eric Chavez, filling in for an ailing Alex Rodriguez, singled home the tiebreaking run in the eighth inning and the New York Yankees hit three homers off previously untouchable Alexi Ogando to beat the Texas Rangers 6-5 on Sunday night. Robinson Cano, Russell Martin and Curtis Granderson all went deep to help the Yankees take [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.mlbnewsblog.com/2011/04/18/chavez-lifts-a-rod-less-yanks-by-rangers-ap
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Diamondbacks slip past Giants 6-5 in 12 innings

Stephen Drew singled in Justin Upton with two outs in the bottom of the 12th inning as the Arizona Diamondbacks averted a three-game sweep by beating the San Francisco Giants 6-5 Sunday at Chase Field. 

The loss snapped a four-game winning streak by the Giants, who got home runs from Aubrey Huff, Buster Posey and Pablo Sandoval.

Madison Bumgarner had his third straight rough outing. The 21-year old southpaw pitched 5.1 innings and allowed four runs on seven hits and a walk. He struck out two. After three starts, MadBum is 0-2 with a 7.36 ERA.


Other notes:

• Starting pitcher Barry Zito (sprained foot) was placed on the 15-day DL prior to Sunday's game. Ryan Vogelsong was called up from Triple-A Fresno to take his spot in the rotation.
• Outfielder Cody Ross (strained calf muscle) is with the Fresno Grizzlies on a rehab assignment and went 2-for-3 with a couple of singles Sunday. He's expected to come off the DL and join the Giants in Colorado on Monday.
• Arizona catcher Miguel Montero took an Enright fastball in the nuts in the 6th inning. After a long and extended delay (during which time the stadium PA played "Come On Eileen"), Montero hung in there (no pun intended) and stayed in the game.
• Sandoval fouled one off his baby makers in the 11th inning.
• The Giants have now made 12 errors this season, third-most in the National League behind Houston (17) and Pittsburgh (14).

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Minor League Report – 4/17/11

Read The Full Article:
http://www.ladodgertalk.com/2011/04/minor-league-report-41711/

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Looking towards the Tribe: The Battle for AL
Central Supremacy

The beginning of this season, by all accounts, has been as absurd as the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Some notes from the first two weeks:

• Boston has the worst record in Major League Baseball (4-10).  In a stat to confound the venerable Bill James, the Red Stockings rank 9th in the majors in On-Base Percentage (.332), but that is by far their highest statistic.  They are 23rd in runs (50), 26th in batting average (.230).  Are they fielding a team of Joey Gathrights?), 24th in slugging (.356), 30th in ERA (6.32), 25th in WHIP (1.44), and 22nd in Batting Average Against (.264). heh.
  
• Alex Gordon is tied for the American League lead in hits (23).
• Alex Gordon (.365) and Billy Butler (.352) are 3rd and 5th in the AL in batting.  Butler is also 2nd in OBP (.469) and leads the league in intentional walks.
  
• Former Royal Johnny Damon, at the age of 237, is 4th in the league in RBI (12).
• Manny Ramirez tested positive (again), and out of love for the game, and respect for the institution, he retired...........moving on.
• Joe Mauer is left out with a viral infection affecting his leg strength.
• There was a triple play somewhere by some team.  I dunno.  It was a big deal for a couple of days until some well-known and highly-touted player made a semi-difficult defensive play.
• Josh Hamilton fractured his arm, called his 3rd base coach stupid, apologized, but maintained that he was dumb(?), and the media continues to swoon over him.

And finally, we find ourselves staring down the barrel of a four-game series that could decide who holds sway over the vaunted position of 1st in the AL Central (in April).  So, let's take a look at the Tribe.

The Indians come in to Kansas City a game up on the Royals, and will look to continue their recent hot streak, as they have won three in a row and eleven of their last thirteen.

• One of the biggest assistants to the Tribe's early success has been the resurgence of once-proud slugger Travis Hafner.  Travis is hitting .354 with an OPS of 1.053 in the early going, with 4 HR's in 13 games.
• Grady Sizemore returned to the Indians lineup recently, and smacked a home run and a double in the 4-2 victory over the sliding Baltimore Orioles on Sunday.
• Cleveland has found success out of a portion of their bullpen, giving up just 13 earned runs in 38 innings so far this season.
• They have also gotten a great run of starting pitching to open the year, with eleven quality starts in fifteen team games.
  

Projected Pitching Matchups for the 4-game Series:

Game 1:  Kyle Davies (1-1, 9.00 ERA, 2.00 WHIP) Vs. Carlos Carrasco (1-1, 5.03 ERA, 1.32 WHIP)

Game 2:  Bruce Chen (2-0, 2.37 ERA, 1.11 WHIP) Vs. Jeanmar Gomez (11 K's, 1.42 ERA in two AAA starts)

Game 3:  Luke Hochevar (2-1, 4.21 ERA, 1.01 WHIP) Vs. Justin Masterson (3-0, 1.33 ERA, 0.93 WHIP)

Game 4:  SOS (1-1, 5.00 ERA, 1.67 WHIP) Vs. Josh Tomlin (3-0, 2.75 ERA, 0.92 WHIP)

Keys for the Royals:

1. Alex Gordon
2. Billy Butler
3. Walks (Both Drawn and Given)
   
4. Bullpen Usage

Keys for the Indians:

1. Travis Hafner
   
2. Asdrubal Cabrera
3. Grady Sizemore
4. Maintain Level of Starting Pitching

Anything less than a split would be disappointing.  These teams are fairly evenly matched, and I suspect it will be an entertaining series.  If we manage to take 3 out of 4, then we will be all alone atop the AL Central.

Bold Prediction:

Kila Ka'aihue ends the series with a .300/.400/.500 line.

Not so Bold Prediction:

Jarrod Dyson steals a base (that may or may not have any direct correlation whatsoever on the actual outcome of the game).

Optimistic Outlook:

Take 3 of 4 behind solid starts from Chen and Hochevar while slugging out a third victory.

Realistic Outlook:

Split the series behind solid starts from Chen and Hochevar.

Uber-Optimist Outlook:

Alcides Escobar elevates a ball more than 20 feet with a distance from home plate greater than 100 feet.

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Line of the Day: April 16th, 2011

SS Starlin Castro of the Chicago Cubs went 4-for-5 with a double, home run, three RBI and a run scored in an 8-3 win over the Colorado Rockies. It was his first home run of the season and increased his batting average to .397.

Line: 5 AB, 1 R, 4 H, 3 RBI; 2B, HR

Fantasy Perspective: Castro is currently the 3rd-ranked shortstop on ESPN with a 5x5 line of .397/12/1/6/2. He was the 11th shortstop drafted with an ADP of 150.6, compared to Derek Jeter being the 4th-drafted shortstop with an ADP of 56 and a 5x5 line of .240/8/0/3/0. Castro is the Cubs new leadoff hitter and in six games this season, he's batting .536 (15/28).


Agree? Disagree? Check out ESPN's formula for determining the best daily performances and nominate your own Line of the Day player using the comments section or hitting me up on Twitter.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/COSFBA/~3/zBS6pmHXPpQ/line-of-day-april-16th-2011.
html

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Lightning Strikes Yankee Stadium

(Via Twitter: @barryap1) As you can tell from this photo, this was not taken tonight. You can tell by the amount of people in the stands. Just thought I would share this spectacular photo. Filed under: Yankees Photos Tagged: Lightning, Weather, Yankee Stadium

Read The Full Article:
http://zellspinstripeblog.com/2011/04/17/lightning-strikes-yankee-stadium/

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The Brief and Haunting Life of Alcides Escobar's
Twitter Account

Sometimes, when doing historical research, all we find are fragments. Fragments that provide more questions than answers, questions that are often without answer.

On August 3, 2009, Alcides Escobar tweeted the following:

Just got Swept By Isotopes.....i'm out later guys

And that was it. He left and never came back. Escobar never tweeted again. He is following no one.

On his own, he roams this Earth scratching out a post-Isotopes-sweep existence.

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Rockies Rewind with Silver: That boy's a monster

In an action only slightly less daring than going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, I am hoping that my internet will play nice long enough to throw this (somewhat short, but who cares) Rockies Review Rewind onto the Interwebs. There's plenty to chew through, and plenty to praise, most of which we've done already, but hey. It's always nice to bask in victory (last night notably excepted). And Tulo, who is, well, a monster.

Because that's just the way things are going these days, and the team hasn't even played their best ball yet -- CarGo is just heating up now, the team batting average coming into today's game was only .259, and of course Ubaldo hasn't had a healthy start. But this has been, ridiculously, good enough to catapult the guys into firm possession of baseball's best record at 12-3. (Worst record? The Red Sox. Aha. AHA. AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA).

Ahem. If you want to keep on enjoying the newfound PURPLE POWER, then JUMP.

In last week's edition, I said that if I was going to be convinced that their hot start was anything more than good luck, the Rockies were going to have to win at Citi Field. Well, you may or may not have noticed, but boy, did they win at Citi Field. They went in and, although they can't exactly be said to have manhandled the Mets -- three of the four wins came by a margin of just one run -- they consistently outplayed them in all facets of the game. They got timely hitting. They got timely defense. They got flat lucky breaks (David Wright hitting a ball to the homer-killing corner, where it hung up long enough for Seth Smith to catch it and end Game 1 of the doubleheader). They didn't shoot themselves in the foot. And oh yeah, some obscure shortstop named Troy Tulowitzki turned the Mets' pitching into his personal word-that-rhymes-with-witch, cranking four homers in four games and usually managing to place them with artistic precision for maximum devastating effect.  The Mets thought they were sneaking away with one, huh? Whoops. Here comes that guy again. Oh look, a bomb.

Let me state the obvious: The 2011 New York Mets are not a good baseball team. Absent some miraculous turnaround, they're going to be setting up camp in the NL East cellar for the rest of the season, and so this technically can't be used as a yardstick to prove our ability against contenders. But this fails to take into account the fact that the Rockies have traditionally had absolute fits when it comes to beating them in Queens; indeed, their failures are downright legendary at this point. (Fernando Tatis! /starts shaking furiously). Not to mention, they have also traditionally had a long record of playing down to their opponents' level and letting weaker teams get away with facepalm-worthy hijinks.

As I also said, elite teams crush the teams they're supposed to crush, even when it's just by luck or a run or the key hit or a superstar named Tulo. Last year, he didn't hit his fourth homer until the middle of May. This year, he hit four homers in five days and is currently in the team lead with seven. Power streaks can always turn off, of course, but April!Tulo this is not. And as has always been observed, as Tulo goes, so goes the team. And of course, before the Mets, the Rockies took three of four from the Pirates in Pittsburgh. While the Pirates have also given us trouble in the past, this year's team is not to be taken lightly; Jose Tabata in particular is probably going to be in my nightmares. But the Rockies got the job done, bouncing handily back from their one extra-inning loss, and that resulted in a 7-1 record on an eight-game East Coast swing. Seven-and-freaking-one. I'm sure no one needs to be reminded that we won 31 games on the road all last year.

However, what impressed me more than the road wafflestompings was the way the Rockies won today. Last night was a textbook example of what most of our early-season games have heretofore looked like: missed opportunities galore, a blowup by the bullpen, a meaningless late homer, and a generally flat effort. Not to mention, an AAA starter going today. It would have been extremely easy to let the malaise carry over, and after a 4-run first inning was followed by several more of notable silence, it looked as if it might. But then the Rockies came out swinging in the crucial late innings, highlighted by Dexter Fowler's two-run, two-out, tiebreaking double (and the sound Coors made when he hit that ball is one of my favorite things in the whole damn world). A couple more runs were added just for good measure, and Huston Street, with a little help from Jose Lopez, nailed down the game in the ninth (likewise recovering from a shaky outing in Game 1 of the doubleheader that required Matt Lindstrom to save his ass). In short, today was exactly what a good team would have and should have done: developing instant amnesia about last night's less than satisfactory result, ignoring the fact that they had Alan Freakin' Johnson starting the game, getting an early quick start and a late clutch hit, to take two of three from the Cubbies and get ready to welcome the Giants to Coors from the high ground.

But as I pointed out, the team has looked decidedly uneven for all that they're sporting a 12-3 record. The production of the offense can't really be faulted, but they're still hitting barely .260 as an overall unit. The bullpen has had its share of weebles (fortunately, none have yet been seriously fatal apart from Paulino's implosion last night). The rotating door at third base has been necessitated by Ian Stewart, Ty Wigginton, and Jose Lopez all looking various degrees of totally lost at the plate, but at least Wigginton and Lopez have directly helped to win ballgames. Although I'm sure no one dislikes it more than Ian Stewart, he has been just painful to watch this year, with 11 K's in 24 ABs and an average and slugging percentage that match: .083. Ouch.

I'm certainly not suggesting that Stewart be chucked out for good on the basis of less than a full month of baseball, but the time that he was thought of as the Rockies' long-term third-sacker of the future appears to be well and truly gone. But of course, neither Wigginton or Lopez have authoritatively laid claim to the job either, so it looks as if the musical chairs will continue for the time being. Carlos Gonzalez has also been slow to get the motor in gear, although he did hit his first home run against the Mets and picked up a four-hit game against the Cubs today. But if he wants a 40/40 season, as he suggested, then hey, how about getting started...?

Naturally, there's only so much you can really criticise when you're sitting at the top of the division, the league, and the game, but I'm doing so if only to point how much room for improvement there really is -- and that has to be a scary thought. If the Rockies finally harness their potential and start getting the gears turning in unison sometime before September (and if they continue to do so on a consistent basis) -- then, just as we've always known but have generally failed to see played out in practice -- then the sky is seriously the limit. I don't want to let us get too carried away with our expectations, as it's (as any well-trained player will tell you in his interview) a long season. But it also cannot be denied that they've already demonstrated leaps and bounds of improvement in very concrete and crucial areas that they never did last season. The fact that they are 12-3 without having yet played their best ball is perhaps our best reason for excitement. Let's cross our fingers and hope that Seth Smith is OK after having to leave the game early today, and that the big bad injury fairy will continue to keep her distance.

Speaking of which, there's also the fact that some guy named Ubaldo Jimenez comes off the DL tomorrow, just in time to face the hated Giants. Greg Reynolds pitched more than capably as a fill-in in his absence, but when you're talking about a pitcher on the caliber of Uball, it's a literal shot in the arm that we most definitely need. Esmil Rogers, Jason Hammel, and Jorge de la Rosa have also all had their share of shaky moments, and it goes without saying that if Uball comes anywhere close to what he did in the first half last year, the party is ON. Even I, an inveterate semi-pessimist (a curmudgeon, if you will) who tends to hedge my bets about most things and the success of my favorite sports teams in particular, can't help but feeling that something special may truly be on order. 

We'll have to see, of course. A few cold streaks could make all of us start hating humanity again. But right now, it's good to be a Rockies fan. Oh yes. Yes it is.

Go ROCKIES!!!!

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Rockies Back on Track with 9-5 Win Over the Cubs

With runners on second and third and two men out in the bottom of the eighth inning, my heart was sinking as I sat 20 rows up behind the Rockies dugout. After all, Colorado had gotten two men in scoring position in the 5-5 game with nobody out but then Jose Morales and pinch-hitter Ty Wigginton (not Giambi?!?) struck out. The situation smacked of yesteryear -- specifically, last year.

Gloriously, my pessimism was unfounded as the Rockies pounded out three straight two-out, run-scoring hits off Marcos Mateo to pull away from the pesky Cubs and avoid losing their first series of the year. Dexter Fowler's two-run double was the big one, obviously, and it sent a number of Cubs fans around me heading to the exits. Hold your head up high Cubs fans -- at least you get cheap tacos tomorrow. Oh, and a Ubaldo bobblehead if you showed up early enough.

Speaking of the crowd, I was satisfied by the Rockies-Cubs fan ratio, much more so than I thought I would be. Those denizens of Chicago behaved themselves pretty well as a substantial minority. I heard a number of Rockies fans say "who is this guy" when Alan Johnson was announced and...well, small sample size and all, but Alan Johnson is not a big league-caliber pitcher. He went 4 IP with 5 runs allowed (4 earned) on six hits, striking out and walking three each. Let's just say that I'm okay with this being Johnson's only start with Colorado.

After the Cubs pushed one across in the first (and they scored in each of Johnson's four innings), the Rockies retook the lead with a vengeance on RBI hits by Carlos Gonzalez, Todd Helton, and a two-run shot by Seth Smith. Smith also added a double and a run scored in the fourth before leaving the game with a tight left groin.

Matt Belisle allowed what seemed like a bunch of baserunners over two interminable (the whole game seemed interminable at times) but scoreless innings of relief, while Matt Reynolds and Rafael Betancourt (1-0) followed suit. Huston Street got the last three outs -- the final out of which was an outstanding diving stop of a liner by Jose Lopez at third.

12 - 3

Games Back: 0

Streak: Won 1

Games Left: 147

Graph:

via www.fangraphs.com  

We Salute: Smith (.225 WPA), Fowler (.222), Gonzlaez (.156, 4-5 on the day)

We Are Disappointed In: Johnson (-.254), Wigginton (-.158)

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