This team is seriously in danger of losing me and there's absolutely no way more of this horseshit can compete with the 2-hour finale of Lost tonight. "Malaise" is right, Blair.After reading Will's post about GIDP my mind wandered to something I read a few years back about Crystal Palace FC, an English football club that had some success back in the early '90s to go along with the second coolest name in the sport after Arsenal. A journo from one of the trashier British tabloids took in a Palace practice and was struck at how lackadaisically the players went through the motions. When he questioned the team captain about why they blew off practice, he was told that "practicing makes us tired." Well no shit, you just can't argue with that logic.
Sometimes things are bad because they're supposed to be bad.
Ah, back to the ol' Bullshit Detector above.
A good number of JaysTalk callers phone in without the foggiest of ideas about what they're going to say (like the guy who wanted to trade for Juan Pierre), but I had reached the conclusion the discourse was somewhat more intelligent for Wednesday's with JP. Someone inevitably asked about trading for "Canadian Boy" Jason Bay (right after somewhat ironically slamming Matt Stairs), prompting two things from JP. First, JP asked the caller to throw down and tell us all who he'd trade. The caller said Jesse Litsch, prompting a paradoxial reply that The Body was too valuable/cost efficient to us, but had little trade value in the eyes of other clubs. Uh, ok?
But it was the second thing that threw me. Paraphrasing, JP said something to the effect of "First, he's not available. And I don't know if you've checked the numbers but he's not exactly tearing it up." Not available? His availability is the worst kept non-secret in the sport. He's more available than Dunn or Griffey, that's for sure. The Pirates might wait until they fall further out of contention before making a move, but they simply cannot afford to keep him in '09. If you think Neal Huntington is foolish enough to believe that he's got anything remotely approaching the 4th best club in the National League you're off your fucking tits.
"Not exactly tearing it up." Bay has a .259/.392/.487 line for a 132 OPS+ to go along with 10 HR. If that's not tearing it up, I don't know what is. And sorry, Scott Rolen is the Greatest Blue Jay Ever, but Bay has the same offensive profile and is slightly out-hitting Rolen Thunder to date, not to mention the rest of the sad sack flaccid little bats that round out the rest of our lineup. I wish I had an entire team of guys like Rolen and Bay.
It's awfully tempting to give up the ghost on this year. I think we all knew that it was going to take a monster V-Dub year a la 2003/2006 for us to seriously be in contention and his replacement for 2+ months by Brad Wilkerson can probably be singled out as the most glaring reason why we're thrashing vainly in the quicksand. John Hale at the Mockingbird sliced through the fog by showing all and sundry that the bats haven't been any better in May despite the team's improved record. It basically comes down to this: you make an impact trade right quick or you accept mediocrity and start making up a list of guys you dump for prospects at the trade deadline. Don't worry, we'll be on that soon enough.
Speaking of trade bait, David Eckstein had a setback in his rehab outing and isn't expected to rejoin the big club tonight as expected. I swear I saw Hector Luna come into last night's game as a pinch runner, I swear it!
Alex Rios can add "horrible baserunner" to his CV according to The Oracle. You do have to credit the guy for coming up with creative new ways to lose games on a nightly basis.
Darren Thomson of Vancouver, B.C. is the first recipient of The Southpaw Award for Courage and Valour in the Line of Fandom for calling Dick Griffin out on his assinine "four guys, six years" assessment of JP's draft record. Well played, sir. And I encourage you to read on because Dick begins one answer "Fo’schizzle less ster-izzle my Rot-izzle." Seriously. And in the next one he assuses Rance Mulliniks of being a chronic masturbator. I am not making this shit up.
ELSEWHERE:
* It begins. A-Rod off the DL, Joba Chamberlain to the rotation. Pardon me while I choke on my own vomit. But it looks like CM Wang might have a calf strain... resisting temptation to make "wang" joke, moving on...
* Bleech, even worse! Bartolo Cologne (haha) started and took the win for the Bosox last night. He clearly did not use his rehab stint to lose weight, though.
-- Johnny Was
2 comments:
sorry to make things even worse, but the LOST finale is next week.
I had to quibble with Jon a bit. I've always contended that the arbitrary division of stats by month proved nothing. April was not one consistent whole, and neither was May.
There was an obvious difference in the first 14 games in April and the last 14, averaging those two into one whole simply based on the calender doesn't make any sort of logical sense.
Most of us thought that the second game of the Cleveland double-header marked a possible end to the slump. Counting back from that game to the blowout of Baltimore, there are 25 games in which we averaged less than three runs a game. That slump doesn't fit neatly into one month but it still represents the "dead bat period" to which subsequent success should be compared.
In the last nine games we've averaged 4 runs a game. Not enough, but almost a run and a quarter better than the DBP.
~Will
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