The Baseball Outsider

May 17, 2009 08:30 pm

Thoughts about Saturday's pitchers

Francisco Liriano, as I've suggested before, is an oddity on the Twins staff. He simply does not have the command of the fastball we expect from Minnesota pitchers, and he never has. On Saturday, he threw 85 pitches, just 48 of them for strikes. A more tyical (for the Twins) ratio of 67% strikes would have been 57 strikes, and while the difference of nine might not seem like much, it is significant.

Liriano could get away with weak fastball command in 2006 because his slider was so overwhelming, but that is no longer the case, and probably never will be again. The Twins are touting his changeup, but unless and until he masters command of the fastball, Liriano's change is not going to be the weapon it is for Johan Santana.

* Last year's AL Cy Young winner, Cliff Lee, is off to a miserable start. It's only two games, but his ERA is 9.90. Worse, his command/control is absent. On Saturday, he walked four men in five innings and threw 45 balls to 57 strikes — essentially the same problem as Liriano.

Lee's case is different from Liriano. Lee had the command last season. But he thew about 78 more innings in 2008 than he did in 2007 (majors and minors combined). That kind of workload increase frequently precedes a collapse of performance.

*A similar case may well be feared with Cole Hamels, the Phillies star. His regular season workload went up 44 innings in 2008 — but then he added another 35 innings in October.

But the Phillies won it all — something they wouldn't have done without him — and I doubt very much that he or anybody connected with the Phils would change that. Still, this trend of postseason aces falling apart the next season is disturbing, and yet another reason for me to dislike the wild card era and the extra round of playoff games it adds.


e-mail Edward Thoma

April 11, 2009 09:28 pm

Random observations

The Monday print column is likely to be about the Twins catching situation, so I was quite interested in watching Jose Morales deal with the challenge of handling R.A. Dickey's knuckleball. Morales did a good job receiving, but he can't be happy about the dropped foul popup or his inability to get a throw off on a stolen base. Most important, somebody certainly goofed with the decision to throw Paul Konerko two consecutive fastballs. Dickey's fastball is useful only as a change of pace from his knuckler; that's why he's converted himself into a knuckleball pitcher. Bert Blyleven was properly critical of the pitch selection. I don't know who's idea it was, but Dickey threw it and probably deserves most of the blame.

Still, the fact remains that Dickey pitched most of the game out of the stretch and nobody advanced on a wild pitch or passed ball. That's a plus for Morales.

• I really liked the Kansas City ball park, which I still think of as Royals Stadium (and not as Kaufman Stadium). My immediate reaction to what little I've seen of the remake is not good, but it's getting very good reviews from people who've seen more of it than I have.

• Nick Adenhart's shocking death in an early-morning auto accident Thursday puts an end to an intriguing prospect progression. Adenhart has been prominent in Baseball America's prospect coverage for years — BA named him the national Youth Player of the Year in 2003 — to the point that I was quite surprised to learne that he was 22 at the time of his death. I've been reading about him for so long I figured he was 25 or so.

He had the Tommy John ligament replacement surgery when he was a high school senior, which knocked him out of the first round. He signed with Anaheim as a 14th round pick and made a splash in the low minors, popping up high on prospect lists again. Then he staggered a bit in the high minors (the Angels' affliates tend to be in high-offense leagues) and the hype not only quieted, he started to appear to be a bust. (BA's obituary says he remained a top prospect, but the fact is that his numbers in Double A and Triple A were not good, and he would not have been in the Angels rotation at the time of his death had they not had John Lackey, Kelvin Escobar and Ervin Santana on the disabled list.)

What might have been, we now will never know.

• Updating the Gardy Watch through Friday night: Two non-starts for Delmon Young, two for Jason Kubel, one for Carlos Gomez. Young's penchant for swinging at the first thing he sees is already causing me to rethink my position that the best alignment leaves Micheal Cuddyer out of the mix.




e-mail Edward Thoma

April 10, 2009 10:46 pm

Twins in the WBC

Twelve players from the Twins organization are on rosters for the World Baseball Classic. Only Joe Nathan is on Team USA. Justin Morneau and Jesse Crain, of course, are on Team Canada.

At one point there were 17 Twins on provisional rosters, the most in baseball, but some of them — such as Francisco Liriano and Jose Mijares — opted out. It's pretty easy to tell that the Mets have more players on Classic rosters than do the Twins. (Looks like half the Puerto Rico squad will be Mets. Actually, it's only six.)

It's kind of funny to see Nick Punto on Team Italy. As far as I can tell, Hein Robb has yet to throw a pitch in the minor leagues, but the Twins did sign him last year out of the European Baseball Academy — and I'm not sure I'd ever heard of that before Googling Robb's name — and there he is, ready to pitch for the RSA in a pool against Cuba, Mexico and Australia. (I'm confident South Africa isn't advancing.)

I see that A.J .Pierzynski isn't on Team USA after all. Ozzie Guillen was joking recently that if AJ's catching for the US, the US will be out of the tourney early, that A.J. just wanted to spend a couple days in Florida. But Team USA will have Brian McCann (Braves) and Chris Iannetta (Rockies) as its catchers. I think I'd prefer Pierzynski to Iannetta.

Here's Team USA's roster.

e-mail Edward Thoma

February 24, 2009 09:00 pm

It's just a fantasy (3B division)

I think I've pretty well established, both in this blog and in the print column, that I'm a skeptic on Joe Crede.

And yet, as I look at my rankings of third basemen, I feel pretty certain that Crede is one of the top 10 third basemen in MLB. Not top five, certainly — he doesn't belong with David Wright or Evan Longoria, much less Alex Rodriguez — but really, is he any more injury prone than Chipper Jones, Scott Rolen or Troy Glaus (who is already out for the first couple weeks of the season, at least)?

It's an odd group, this year's third baseman — besides the handful of established stars, there are a bunch of rehab projects (Crede, Jones, Glaus, Mike Lowell, Rolen, Ryan Zimmerman, Hank Blalock, Eric Chavez), the guys who always seem a few days away from losing their jobs (Jorge Cantu, Edwin Encarncion, Josh Fields, Pedro Feliz) and the guys whose reputations are seldom matched by production (Adrian Beltre, Alex Gordon, Garrett Atkins).

One odd thing this spring — I don't think there's anybody moving a third baseman to a middle infield spot this year. Generally there's somebody doing that — last year, for example, the Rays shifted Akinori Iwamura to second base— and in the STATS game, that sort of thing opens up an opportunity to add those double play points I carried on about in the second base post. This year teams are moving people from the middle of the field to third base — Mark DeRosa with Cleveland, Brandon Inge with Detroit. (DeRosa spent most of 2008 playing second base, and Inge got most of his PT behind the plate.)

An uninspiring crew, all told.

e-mail Edward Thoma

February 24, 2009 08:18 pm