
Here are a couple of additional items that I didn’t really want to hold onto any longer…
Message For Beeston
I don’t usually do this, but our commenter Jeff absolutely nailed together a few perfect sentences on what the fuck is so bothersome about Cito’s golden parachute, even beyond the fact that his managerial style defies all logic.
“You hire the kid, you say how great he is, then you better let him, or his people make 100% of the decisions,” he says. “Anything else is half assing it. Yea, it's only one year, but you've got players going through important development years. Stop fucking around.”
Um… yeah. Exactly. This still completely feels like a total handjob-your-buddy fuckaround that’s going to serve no one well next year, except Paul Beeston and Cito Gaston.
Wilner on Wells and More On Gaston
You know what? Fuck the absolute fucking piece of shit clowns who like to needle me about parroting Wilner, as though there’s some incalculably vast number of opinions on baseball that one could hold, and the fact that there’s some overlap between what two people are saying means that one person is just parroting the other. Speaking of incalculable, that’s incalculably fucking stupid—so I’m going to quote some fantastic stuff from Wilner’s blog today at the Fan590 and not give a shit… er… well, beyond saying that.
Anyway, Wilner nails it re: Vernon and his somewhat-admirable desire to play hurt.
This is two years in the last three that Wells has tried to play through injury “for the good of the team” while going out every day in a very important spot in the batting order and - for lack of a better word - sucking. Is it his fault? Doubtful. It’s very difficult to blame a player for not wanting to come out of the line-up if he’s physically able to play (never mind play well). It’s exceedingly rare to find a player who will step back and say “Not only am I not helping, but I’m hurting the team and embarrassing myself in the process. I have to ask out.” Don’t blame Wells for wanting his name written into the line-up everyday.
. . .
At some point, Cito Gaston (and John Gibbons before him) has to be the grown-up, as it were, and tell Wells that he’s doing more harm than good trying to play in his condition and sit him down - or at least drop him to a far lower-leverage spot in the batting order until he gets healthy.
Gaston’s response to the batting order thing was always “if you’re not going well, you’ll come up in a big situation no matter where you’re hitting.”
Bang on. And… uh… about that Cito quote. I’m not sure it’s a verbatim quote from some point during the season, or if it’s just a paraphrase of something Cito’s said many times, but it’s the kind of thing that absolutely fucking kills me the he doesn’t understand.
CITO! For fuck sakes, buddy, let me slow it down for you a bit. When you being a new game, regardless of who was the last out in the last game, you start at the top of your order. That means that… say a game finishes and your fourth hitter was the last out. And say that him and the three guys ahead of him in the order ended up with five plate appearances each. How many plate appearances did the five-through-nine spots get? That’s right, four. That’s one extra plate appearance for everybody who came to bat in that half-finished last run through the order. And the thing about that is, over the course of a year, those all add up. So… how do you best use all those extra plate appearances that accumulate at the top of the lineup? You put your most productive hitters there. Otherwise you make the baby fucking Jesus cry!!!
It’s not a “stats” guy thing, it’s not rocket surgery, it’s basic fucking counting.
Houston Welcomes Arnsberg
Ugh. Apparently it’s piss on Cito day—get used to it, folks—except that this one you can’t take nearly as seriously. Here is what Astros blog Crawfish Boxes concluded at the end of a lengthy—and I’m sure well-intentioned—examination of what to expect from their new pitching coach, Brad Arnsberg, and the trail of dead arms that follows behind him.
Arnsberg gets blamed for the injuries to Marcum and McGowan, but in their formative years with the club, you can see he really didn't do much to hurt them. Only in 2008 did his usage patterns significantly change, and that also coincided with a new manager, Mr. Old School Cito Gaston. This is a classic example of a guy from a bygone era trying to throw pitchers out there like they did in the '70's and hoping it will work. In 2008, for example, Gaston used pitchers on short rest six times, while the American League average was just 3.7. In 2009, he was right in line with the league average of 3, but it still shows that he used his pitchers differently than most of the league. Arnsberg didn't like it, and clashed with his manager as was chronicled here and here. I'm not sure you can blame Arnsberg for what happened to Litsch but you definitely can't blame him for Marcum and McGowan. B.J. Ryan also can't be blamed on him, nor can A.J. Burnett, as both guys had either a history of injuries or a jump in innings before coming to Toronto.
. . .
Arnsberg coached for four different managers and only under Gaston did his track record go astray. Out of all his young pitchers, just three were inordinately abused: Chacin, Litsch and Vasquez. Now, we can see that Vasquez was just built to hold up to a higher workload, similar to Roy Halladay. Still, it doesn't excuse the abuse in the first place. Is Gaston more to blame for the last couple of seasons in Toronto? We can't REALLY tell, but after reviewing all this, I certainly feel better about the Astros' new pitching coach.
Thing is, Cito was only at the helm for four of McGowan’s 2008 starts—and only in one of those did he go over 90 pitches—so even I don’t think I could go as far as blaming Cito for that. But otherwise, the work these guys put in toward trying to paint Arnsberg as a guy who doesn’t destroy pitchers is pretty interesting.