Ok so there have been some important developments both good and bad on each of the 3 birds recently from returning/soon to return injured players, good outings from unexpected players and optioning players back to the minors. Well as usual we'll separate it out into 3 sections one for each team, and we'll go at it alphabetically.
Baltimore:
So the biggest change in their roster lately has been sending Kevin Gausman back to the minors, now this isn't a huge surprise as he's had a bit of trouble adjusting to the majors, now he hasn't been horrible or anything but he hasn't stellar either and with the depth they have in starters it's not a terrible idea to send him back to work things out and bring up another starter to gamble on (Jake Arrieta in this case). In addition their replacement for Wei Yin Chen, Freddy Garcia, has actually been playing pretty well (that is for how he usually plays) and is holding his own against some good offence from the AL East. Now while their pitching luck just never seems to run out their offence has begun cooling down, Chris Davis has been cooling down a bit, which is kind of what we come to expect of him, though not as often as he has become a whole different offensive player. You can see this just in the box scores as more than the last week of games for them has rendered only 4 or less runs scored and a good majority of these games are being won by only 1-2 runs, which seems to indicate their returning to what they did during the 2012 season, winning extremely close games all the time. In terms of the upcoming future they have a bit of an up and down schedule with a couple more games against Boston now then a series against Detroit, but then they take on Toronto and Cleveland before returning to face the Yankees. So from that it would seem they may need to right their offence sooner rather than later since they have some tough competition and most of their upcoming series are against division rivals.
St. Louis:
Once again the Cardinals are still at the top of the MLB and still by a fair distance. Now one notable move they've made was sending down Michael Wacha in order to make room for Jake Westbrook as he just game off the DL and pitched a game recently. Now while Westbrook is obviously owed more money and the Cardinals thus have more reason to get him on the mound I'm not sure it was the best of ideas to send Wacha down. The reason for this is because this would have been a good time to get him some more experience in the majors since the future of Chris Carpenter as a starter is still in flux and Westbrook's skill has been on the decline and who knows how much longer he'll be a viable starter. Now theres no use crying over spilt milk so we'll all just have to take this as it is.Though they had a bit of a hiccup over the last 3 games since they haven't been giving much run support as these games ended in a loss 1-5, win 2-1 and loss 4-5 respectively with the first 2 games against the Mets and the last against the Marlins who both have pretty terrible offences. Now I don't expect this trend to continue but it's something to note considering how tight the race for first in the NL Central is between the Pirates, Reds and the Cardinals.
Toronto:
Not much new since my last post on them, their average with runners in scoring position is still crap in most games, J.P. Arencibia is still killing our chances at runs as he gets out at the most inopportune times and the back end of the batting order isn't doing much hitting wise. Now I can't completely apply this to Friday's game and thats because the team went 3 for 5 with runners in scoring position, the middle infield (Bonifacio and Kawasaki) made 3 great double plays over the game and there weren't many left on base to begin with. Though J.P. still didn't do anything different as he left the most people on base and struck out once as well, despite being moved down to the 7th spot in the order and unfortunately Bautista swung at some pretty crappy pitches as well and didn't get on base once. Now one of the new problems that has come up is just that, Bautista. He's been using worse and worse plate discipline lately and his childish actions of getting pissed at umpires isn't helping him or the team at all (it's probably making it worse for him as I'm sure Umps don't take kindly to that shit) and it's sad because we've got some potential future stars in guys like Rasmus and Lawrie but our senior who's supposed to be setting a good example is Bautista. Overall someone needs to smack him upside the head and tell him to calm the fuck down because he SHOULD be playing at the same rate that Encarnacion is playing at, that's what his usual play looks like. On the positive side Buerhle continues to string together quality start after quality start, which was surprising since it was against the Rangers hefty offence and at their home run friendly home stadium and the fact that their starting Lind now against lefties now is great since he's been hitting the ball all over the place lately. Now there is one thing I wanted to bring up involving the Jays, I recently read an article on a Blue Jays news site saying that no one was to blame for their recent struggles, now I don't completely agree with this I realize that pitching coach Pete Walker is doing a good job, despite what you see with Dickey, because Buerhle is throwing quality outings, Johnson has been half decent and all the new starters being slotted in that Walker has to work on have been terrific for at least 2 or more starts. Gibbons I don't think can be blamed too much here as well since he's juggled the lineup every way he can to light up our hitters and got the Bonifacio-Kawasaki pair to take some defensive lessons from Roberto Alomar. On the other hand I DO believe that some blame has to be placed on the shoulders of hitting coach Chad Mottola, now there are specific reasons for this. First being that the Jays have been extremely inconsistent in terms of hitting with runners in scoring position (a lot of the time with poor plate discipline) then Secondly is Bautista and Arencibia hitting as terrible as they are. Now some may not think much of this but it's a hitting coaches responsibility to talk to hitters when they've hit slumps to help correct the way they are doing things and get them back on track. Now if they continue playing like they did on Friday I will take that first point back but the second stuff is something that he needs to take action on NOW, Baustista's attitude in my opinion will eventually become toxic and cause problems for the entire team and it's causing him to make bad judgement at the plate (and more than likely umpires aren't cutting him as much slack). Now Arencibia has been always like this but there was an article that had an interview with him basically saying to improve he just stopped caring about striking out, now this is something an idiot would do because NO player out there can just swing at whatever the fuck he feels like and expect to come out ahead, I mean his on base percentage is almost the same as his average (which is extremely low as is). Basically in my opinion Mottola needs to correct both of these players way of thinking for the betterment of the team and maybe then we can start improving as we have pitchers coming back soon and Reyes' return on the horizon.
-Eric
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