Bird Watch: Interesting Weeks

We'll this was an interesting week for the Orioles, Jays and Cardinals, why you ask? Well that's for a couple reasons. First for the Jays, despite their offensive turn around in one of the games against both th Twins and Orioles they continue to have major struggles with their offence and their starting pitching situation is still more or less the same. This is evident because when you look at box scores you see that the Jays again have fallen back into their slump of terrible hitting with runners in scoring position with 1:13 or 0:7, just absolutely terrible and that's not even getting into some of e less patient hitters on the team falling back into swinging for the fences at whatever they want. The basic take away here is that Kevin Seitzer needs to sit down with some of the guys and give em another talk because it's obvious when they get frustrated at a slump they too fall back into old habits. On here side of the Orioles we have them just playing steady but that's not the interesting news, the interesting news is good ok' Manny Machado, see during the last weekend series against the Athletics he got into a bit of a bitchy mood after he was tagged out by Josh Donaldson, which he claimed was too hard. So next he hit the A's catcher Derek Norris in the head on his back swing several times and when it looked like a relief pitcher was throwing at him he decided to throw s bat, albeit poorly, at the pitcher. Now I do understand that this is a very young kid and other than this people have generally raved shout him being respectful, but the problem I have is how he handled it, which included a public apology followed by a contradictory appeal of his 5 game suspension. It's kind of ridiculous that he'd try and appeal, a suspension like that after putting up a 'heartfelt' apology but we'll see what happens with the appeal and if ten comes back to bite him. Now finally on the Cardinals they have had 2 serious things happen, the first is a bit of a reversal of their pitching mainly seen in Wachas recent struggles, which were coupled with major success from Miller and Garcia, which wasn't there before. Now again that's not much to be worried about because remember Wacha is a young guy in s first full season of baseball so don't fret unless this continues for a few more starts. The second, and more influential thing that happened with the Cardinals, which is that Adam Waignwright suffered an injury to his elbow! Fortunately this doesn't seem to be terribly serious as many on the Cardinals side have claimed that the issue is closer to tennis elbow than to a torn UCL, which would result in another Tommy John surgery, which might very well knock the Cardinals out of playoff contention. Similarly with Wacha the issue with Waignwright will likely become more clear once his supposed next start that he is supposed to make.