The Daily Prospectus: Notes from Around the Majors

Channeling the spirits of Joe Sheehan, Jackie Harvey, and Peter Gammons…

• Barry Bonds has a 290 point advantage in OPS over the #2 guy in MLB, Jim Thome. Dropping down another 290 points from Thome gets you to Tony Tarasco. Yeesh.

   

• Pitch Count of the night: Joe Kennedy, 123. Why did he go that far, at age 23 for a team that won't win 60 games? Probably because Lee Gardner followed him with 2/3 of an inning of 4-run ball for the loss. Managing the Devil Rays is something like competing on "Iron Chef", and having Chairman Kaga reveal a huge ziggurat of lint.

   

• Kit Pellow went yard. Pellow's logged seven years in the minors as a replacement level 3B/1B. It's a nice thing to see him hit a major league bomb. He's a comparable player, probably superior, to Vinny Castilla, and has been for a couple years. But hey, AOL Time Warner's flush with cash, right? For the record, the HR count for the year is Pellow 1, Gabe Kapler 0.

   

• A few quotes I love from the new edition of Weaver On Strategy:

  "If you're carrying twelve pitchers, you're crowding your roster with relievers to face hitters that most teams don't have the space to carry any more."

  "Don't play for one run unless you know that run will win a ballgame." (Weaver's sixth law)

  "Your most precious possessions on offense are your twenty-seven outs."

   

• The Ouch Factor…

  Player             AB   BA   OBP  SLG
  Vaughn, Greg      251  .163 .286 .315
  Hernandez, Ramon  307  .235 .318 .336
  Thomas, Frank     420  .231 .337 .433
  Kapler, Gabe      223  .269 .300 .354 (In Arlington and Coors)
  Castilla, Vinny   434  .230 .265 .343
  Hundley, Todd     215  .195 .278 .391
  Shinjo, Tsuyoshi  320  .238 .295 .369
  Izturis, Cesar    389  .229 .252 .296
  

  For those of you who have some of these guys on your HACKING MASS teams, I salute you. (We're working on an update there.)

   

• Scale Balancing:

  Choose Column A or B.

             A                    B
     Segui, David         Rodriguez, Alex
     Stottlemyre, Todd    Wilson, Paul
     Surhoff, B.J.        Kielty, Bobby
     Offerman, Jose       Bellhorn, Mark
  

  Before you choose, remember that column A is considerably more expensive than column B.