Jake

I see the reverence for Palka's bat as completely unearned. In spite of a large HR total in the minors the accompanying numbers haven't been terribly impressive and that was while generally being a bit old for the levels he's played well in. A whopping .860 OPS this season is what got him called up here — that's after mid .700s OPS in AAA in two seasons previous. I see him as a guy with a similar track record to what Delmonico had last year but with considerably higher risk due to his very poor athleticism and history of strikeout problems. I wouldn't write him off, especially since he's bopped some here in MLB, but he's a guy with warts and is a bad week away from having bad season numbers.

My basic point was that he didn't look like a guy who could run the bases or field and while he can hit a ball hard, he has an ugly swing that doesn't inspire confidence that he can time up offspeed pitches. I'm not writing him off but he has to hit a lot in order to have any value. I certainly wouldn't take any of Davidson's at bats away in favor of Palka.

This is what I'm talking about with Palka

Sox have killed two rallies with bad coaching today

That was...bad

Well what I say about Engel is that he swings like someone who has only heard about baseball swings from reading books but hasn't ever actually seen someone do it.

Man do I love Yolmer.

With his swing, I don't like how noisy his hands are and I'm not in love with where his hands start off. Again, there's nothing wrong with the results per se. And then in the field and on the bases, he just doesn't seem like much of an athlete. That's a sin that can be forgiven with production of course.

Palka has been hitting but I've gotta say he sure doesn't pass the eye test to me.

For me, Garcia is really a good guy to have around.

Another note on Nicky: I noticed on Baseball Savant that his batted ball numbers are actually better this year than last. He appears to have been very lucky last season, with a number of his home runs having a worse than 50/50 shot of success. This season he has been slightly unlucky by the same metrics. But the other big change from last season to this season is that teams are shifting against him about half the time, whereas they did that only a very small portion of his ABs last year. His numbers against the shift are very poor.

How long do we tolerate Nicky hitting with zero power?

Ricky asleep at the wheel

No, but having watched him in college it wasn't super surprising that he looks like he does now. He was a guy who was in that "effectively wild" type of mold, often pitching very deep into counts, etc. Add in more patient hitters who are better at punishing mistakes and you can see how he's struggled at the upper levels.

I also think it's misguided to try to develop Fulmer into a reliever anytime soon. His problems aren't ones that are likely to be easily covered up in the pen. The same things that would be necessary for him to succeed in the bullpen are the ones that he needs for success as a starter. If he gets to the point where he has some consistency but the thing holding him back is lack of a third pitch (or just too many solid guys ahead of him), then move him to the pen.

One of the clearest signs that Fulmer is too early on his developmental path is how frequently he doesn't just miss in a location, he misses it 2-4 pitches in a row all in the same place.

That wind must be nasty because that ball looked like it was hit straight to right and it ended up going to Leury

It's an especially good comparison in that it was widely believed that Gordon's chances to be successful were squandered by his early call-up to the majors

Fulmer is a useful example if you've ever wondered what it would look like if you called up a decent prospect who was just figuring out AA/AAA to the majors. You can see a MLB pitcher in there for short bursts of a few innings but he just can't keep it together long enough. Question will be how the Sox choose to deal with their developmental failure here. Fulmer might be able to work through it in MLB but it will take a lot of mental toughness; it's a very risky strategy but all we've done with his career so far is gamble with it. I hadn't been in favor of demoting him, but if I were running the show I'd probably have Fulmer and Kopech swap places at this point.

My understanding is that the recent trend with pitchers is to err on the side of waiting too long to return and sometimes taking more than 12 months as a part of that. I know for a while you would see guys going under that 12 month mark and I believe there was a concern that practice led to more re-injuries.

By far the most notable development with Collins since that thread was started about him is the lack of strikeouts. It takes a hell of a lot less time for your BABIP to regress to the mean if you actually put the ball in play.

Just let his development dictate the timeline. There's no reason to call him up now because he hasn't proven enough yet. If he gets very hot for a sustained amount of time, either quickly promote to AAA or decide that if he keeps it up for a couple months you might just have to call him up. It's worth remembering that team control isn't everything here. If a guy is at the point where he won't be getting better until he gets to the majors, then you have to bring him up. If you wait too long, you don't have guys peaking at the right time and you end up extending the rebuild longer than it should have been. I think we are very close to this point with Michael Kopech, where it's going to be negative for his development timeline to stay in AAA.

Going to be tough to get into the Cards bullpen today.

Giolito looks as good as I've seen him. Still concerned about the velocity, but you don't need so much velocity if you can paint the corners like this.

FWIW, I believe the recovery from Tommy John for position players is substantially shorter than for pitchers, to the extent that they could probably decide to wait till the offseason and have Micker only miss part of the following season.