Jake

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.

They have to figure something out with W-S, I don't like the situation as it is and adding Robert just makes things more cramped. Maybe Basabe goes up to AA.

While I don't disagree that the decision to call up Anderson was affected by our MLB situation and our hopes for competing, Anderson's call-up was definitely the most defensible of those moves. He really was close to ready for MLB, at least as close as we were likely to get him without exposing him to big league competition. He was and is a work in progress, but I'm not sure that a couple more months or even the rest of that season would have made him better off at this point. Fulmer, on the other hand, has been jerked around so badly it's remarkable that he's been competitive in MLB this season.

I think this is where I disagree in that a home run is always a big moment with the probable exception of when you're being blown out. I think we'd be wise to think of what we tolerate as all well and good in football celebrations. A homer is like getting a sack, so I'm okay with them doing a sack dance.

My favorite double standard is the one applied to pitchers. If you're a pitcher and you get a big strikeout to get out of a jam, nobody begrudges you doing a big Tiger Woods fist pump and scream. But a guy hits a home run and he's supposed to run real fast, stay quiet, and not watch it go. Otherwise he would be disrespectful to that poor pitcher.

Collins now with a .190/.392/.362 line (that's a .754 OPS for those who don't like math) and has a 24% BB% paired with a 30% K%. It's really something that with the way he started his numbers are basically right back into the realm of respectability this quickly.

I was having flashbacks to the infamous Gordon Beckham dropped popup play right there

I just don't get why we brought Minaya up, why Covey was added to the roster, or why Minaya was used here.

It's just one of those things. If one of their guys did what Tim did, I'd probably hate him and be sympathetic if one of our players lost his temper at him. But he's our guy and I like it because it's really not a big deal. If I learned one thing from the World Baseball Classic, it's that it's way more fun when guys act like they're living and dying on each play

Yeah this was a case where the D cost him runs but it's obvious that he's in big trouble with the way his pitches look and how hard they're hitting them

Yeah I think the main factor here is a bunch of really frustrated KC guys. Minor transgressions can really get you hot when things are going so badly