gehringer_2

Right now there are maybe half a dozen guys in AA/A+: Keith, Serretti, Bigbie, Navigato, Perez, Jung, who all have nice small samples that we are waiting to see are real or not. OTOH, Lakekand and Toledo are just depressing.

Dingler and Workman - both with lots of early hype, both with pretty questionable futures.

The people who actually posted as Q supposedly were Paul Furber and Ron Watkins (who ran for Congress in AZ in '20 and lost in the GOP primary). But for sure they were not their own source.

FOr this team - even if he gets there that's something.

delta velo. Change and slider are the same pitch speed and neither is different enough from the FB (10mph is the usual the minimum to effectively mess up a hitter's timing). He has a slower curve but doesn't use it enough to matter. So that is the kind thing he could work on at pressure lower than MLB. Of course he might not be able to do it, but I think you do your org a disservice if you don't get guys to try things before giving up. I mean - Bonderman did *try* to throw a change, he couldn't master it. The particular thing with Wentz (I posted about this after a previous start) is that he made a change since last season that made this issue worse. He added some velo to his FB but the velo of his other pitches came up MORE, so the difference this season is less. OK - so maybe the brain trust has to go back and revisit it? That how the process goes - sometimes not everything you do works out the way it was expected. Maybe they understood all this in March and planned to figure it out over time in Toledo - after-all, he wasn't supposed to be in Det in the first half of this season. In Detroit if we know anything by now is that players are too hard to find. Sure you can beat a dead horse too long, like in the case of Christin Stewart maybe, but generally it costs you less to be patient and exhaust the possibilities than give up on guys who go succeed somewhere else. Even if a Wentz ends up as reliever you still want him throwing the best stuff he can.

I'd also say that with a *good* 3B and Moreno's double is an out and Boyd is out of the inning before Gurriel comes up. The differences between good teams and bad teams tend to be all over the field.

and he's at a -16 rds/yr pace there.

just when you think Matt might get out of it - Boom.

TBH I wasn't real impressed with his play there. Nice arm, couldn't seem to go to his right. But nobody who's played 3rd this season can go to his right (Edit: as Maton just demonstrated) - maybe Kreidler if you didn't blink during his time there.

boyd comes back with a couple of clean innings

except he's not holding down the hot corner in RF. Credit where credit is due, McKinstrey looks like a nice player. Jury definitely still out of Maton, Malloy, Vierling and Nevin.

another XBH for the old dude. Cabrera on a mini-streak

Wentz needs more change in velo. He can certainly work on pitch repertoire at AAA more reasonably than Detroit. It's true guys can get stuck were they don't work on what they need to in the minor because they're having success there, but if your MiLB coaches can't get them past that you need new coaches. In Faedo's case he needs to pitch more - period. That can happen wherever it's appropriate. But he's only thrown something like 100 ip over the 4 previous yrs. When guys are out that much that long 100 IP is not unusual to get command/consistency back, then see what you may have. He's a little over 40 for this season to far. Not to mention that Toledo needs some guys who can be successful there right now!

LOL - so could most of the numbers we talk about here most of the time.

you can't trade draft picks in baseball, but you can 'buy' additional prospects in trades by picking up salary burden for teams that need that. Of course if you don't have the capability to evaluate players in another team's system as well or better than they do themselves, it still won't get you far.

a couple of good starts by Faedo and Wentz made it seem less bad than it was but both of those guys need to be in MiLB developing more repertoire before either has hope of having consistent MLB success. Englert had come up and pitched over his head as well, which also probably wasn't sustainable. It's totally schizophrenic how every move this team make on the pitching side yields more than we have right to expect while everything they touch on the hitting side other than Greene seems to just die.....

In the BP we are seeing a little bit of normal regression to the mean - Lange is fine but I think he was pitching over his head there for a while. I would like to see one more power arm in the pen to pair with Foley. That was supposed to be Cisnero, but it appears Jose's stuff is going downhill.

Torkelson was better in May (783 OPS) than in April(575) but then went 0 for Philly. If he gets back to his May pace we'll be having less of this discussion. And I like this. Torkelson only swings at the 1st pitch in 30% of his PA - compared to the fact the almost any decent MLB pitcher is throwing more than 50% strikes on the 1st pitch. But the better part is that when he does swing at the 1st pitch, his K rate is 13%, When he takes it, it's 27%. That's not a skill problem, it's a tendency, and I if were him, I'd think about mving away from it. Now granted, taking the 1st pitch worked for Joe Mauer and he won a couple of batting championships, but not everybody is Joe Mauer.

While I was quite peeved that they shipped out Paredes without ever giving him a fair audition, I admit that I am one who had no problem with them letting Candelario go - I thought that was an up and down year kind of player and preferred a more consistent performer, but of course I assumed that Harris, being new Wunderkind, would prove up the task of finding a competent replacement. To be quite frank, his first effort to refill a position on the field has been a failure. None of the major league guys Harris acquired have shown ability to fill the position at replacement level and the minor league player that was supposed to be the possible future there appears not to have the needed glove even if he may yet have the bat to get to the majors at some position.

TBF - that's a pretty good starting point.

figures the Tigers would lose the game when they finally score 6.

2/3 BB. Maybe if we run down Torkelson enough we may end up with a real ballplayer.

yeah this. Rule one is don't insult potential voters, even if they deserve it. That's what surrogates are for.

Jung, Bigbie and Serretti all hitting the ball for WM..

decent play by Tork there goes for naught.