Well in terms of the last week for the Cardinals and the Blue Jays it's been a mixed bag for Toronto and nothing but good news for the Cardinals. The Cards continue to dominate baseball and for some reason all of their pitching prospects they call up just begin to succeed in a big way right off the bat, where as the Jays prospects have a couple outings of positive pitching then kinda collapse. Now the one thing this speaks volumes about is the pitcher development crew in St. Louis, just like Tampa Bay they are top notch. I mean nearly every one of their pitchers called up in the last 2-3 years have been fantastic. Especially when you look at guys like Jaimie Garcia, Lance Lynn, Shelby Miller, Trevor Rosenthal and now Michael Wacha. The Jays on the other hand have been calling up every prospect or AAA pitcher that is showing positive signs in hopes of turning just one or two good outings for the team, though guys like Chad Jenkins have had prolonged success and with a good chunk of our starting vanguard returning within a month or so theres hope for the pitching (McGowan, Drabek and Hutchison).
So again there isn't honestly much to say about the Cardinals, their prospects they've called up to replace their injured starting rotation have been performing as expected or better, sitting them still with the best record in baseball. And considering how much work goes into properly developing pitchers as they go through the minor leagues I tip my hat to them. Now so far Michael Wacha has only had 2 starts, 1 stellar and 1 not so great, though both ended up loses for him. Though just like in the case of Gausman with the Orioles you've got to look closer at the stats, overall he's only walked 1 batter, which is usually something struggling rookies have problems with, keeping the ball in the strike zone. But if Wacha doesn't have that issue chances are when he gets a feel for major league hitters (which should happen soon) he'll become a pretty dominant force in that rotation. Another thing that tells you that you can't just let a score line explain everything for you is that he had a large amount of fly balls (12) in his bad outing, 5 more than his debut, and of course whether those get turned into outs has more to do with the outfielders defensive prowess than his pitching ability. Now am I talking out of ass about that? Well with a 2.72 FIP and a 3.32 xFIP, which are field independent pitching stats basically indicating what his ERA is estimated at if fielding needs were taken out of the picture, we can see he got quite a bit unlucky in that last outing and if he continues to pitch the way he did in his debut he'll be able to rebound no problem. Added to the fact that his next start is against the Mets and then they face the Cubs and Marlins says he'll be able to work out any problems since the Cardinals will be playing pretty crappy teams.
Now the Blue Jays, just when you see one glimmer of hope you notice another stain appear. Now what I'm referring to is the great performances by Josh Johnson and R.A Dickey the last 2 days, both of these pitchers did fantastic. However their offence was asleep again, in the first game they were facing Lincecum a guy who doesn't really have his best stuff this year and has had problems with his control, someone who a strong offence should pounce on. But we were only able to score 1 run and get 5 hits over the game and then there was that throwing error by Edwin that cost the winning run. Though I just think that was a poor choice to put Edwin at 3rd to begin with, I mean theres a reason fans called him E5 when he was with Cincinnati. Though I can't blame him because he was both him and Cabrera were good at the plate, meanwhile Bautista was reaching out of the zone for bad pitches and Arencibia was striking out at an alarming rate as usual and the rest of the team wasn't doing such a great job with their plate discipline either. Now theres a couple things that bothered me when I heard baseball analysts and news reporters say, the first being that apparently J.P Arencibia talked with a reporter and said that he just stopped caring about strikeouts because thinking about them was messing up his approach at the plate. Now thats all well and done if your not striking out nearly 50% of the time, the other thing that scared me a bit was when Buck Martines said, during a broadcast, that Munenori Kawasaki has the most average number of pitches seen each at bat for the entire team with 4.8. Now why is this disturbing? Well thats because it means that at most our hitters are seeing 5 pitchers per appearance, thats not even enough to get a strike out or walk when the count is full. This means that some of our hitters, including Arencibia, are swinging at poor pitches, not being selective on when they swing and are getting themselves out in a hurry. Everyone just needs to watch one of Kawasaki's at bats, he may not have power but he's very selective at the plate, he makes the pitchers throw him lots of pitches (I've seen times where he gets 10-12 pitches in one at bat), which will no doubt tire the pitcher out. Same goes for yesterday's game, Dickey pitched great but it was over shadowed by the poor offence, their avg with RISP was 2 for 7, which again is very poor considering who is on the team. and despite the score saying 4 runs were scored, that was all done in one inning and most that got on base were from walks or hitting from the less power guys int he line up (Dickey, DeRosa and Lind). The pitching is getting better but the offence now needs to get it's shit together again, like I always say if they can get above .500 in a hurry and stay within striking distance of first they can make the playoffs (5-7 games) but they still need to DO that. So here's hoping.
-Eric
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