2011 April « Mike Scioscia's tragic illness

Your 2011 Albuquerque Isotopes (Updated)

April 5, 2011 at 7:19 am | Posted in Albuquerque Isotopes, Josh Lindblom | 26 Comments

Thanks to Christopher Jackson of the Albuquerque Examiner and the Isotopes themselves, we now know what the Opening Day roster for the 2011 AAA squad will look like. Keep in mind, of course, that Tim Wallach’s 2010 edition ran through approximately 287 players, so the crew you see today will hardly resemble what we see ending the season, thanks to injuries, promotions, and trades. They haven’t yet announced the actual roles of the pitchers, so I’m going to do my best guesses on that. Since it’s AAA in a high-offense environment, I won’t bag on them too badly for going with the dreaded 13-man staff.

Starting Rotation (5)
R Tim Redding
R John Ely
L Dana Eveland
R Carlos Monasterios
R Jon Link (who apparently made it through waivers after being DFA’d)

Relievers (8)
L Scott Elbert
L Randy Keisler
R Roman Colon
R Travis Schlichting
R Merkin Valdez
R Oscar Villarreal
R Jon Huber
R Ramon Troncoso

How about that – each member of the 13-man staff has seen previous big-league time. That’s either a very good thing (experience) or very bad thing (no highly-touted young prospect coming up), depending on how you look at it. This collection might change before the season even starts, of course, if Redding or Ely need to start in place of Jon Garland in San Diego this weekend.

Hitters (11 + 1 DL)
C JD Closser
C Damaso Espino
C Keyter Collado (DL)
1B John Lindsey
2B Justin Sellers
SS Dee Gordon
3B Russ Mitchell
IF Juan Castro
LF Jerry Sands
CF Trayvon Robinson
RF Jamie Hoffmann
OF Trent Oeltjen

Only six of the eleven bats – Closser, Lindsey, Mitchell, Castro, Hoffmann, and Oeltjen – have MLB experience, though that’s likely to change by season’s end. I didn’t expect that Gordon would start off in AAA, but the idea of having him, Sands, and Robinson all in the lineup together is going to make me want to catch more than my share of Albuquerque baseball. This lineup is likely to change shortly as well, with Ivan DeJesus almost certainly headed back to AAA this week when Casey Blake returns.

As you may remember, a few days before Christmas I took a shot at predicting what the Opening Day roster might be. Of the eleven bats, I nailed eight: Closser, Lindsey, Sellers, Mitchell, Sands, Robinson, Hoffmann, and Oeltjen. I’m taking a mulligan on two others; DeJesus would be here if not for Blake’s injury and will be here anyway soon enough, and A.J. Ellis would be here if Dioner Navarro hadn’t hurt himself in the last week of spring. I whiffed on Castro not going to AAA and Gordon starting in AA, assuming that Eugenio Velez and Travis Denker or an NRI would be there instead.

On the pitching side, I successfully got eight: Ely, Eveland, Monasterios, Link, Elbert, Villareal, Schlichting, and Troncoso. Redding, Colon, Keisler, and Valdez all signed after my post. I’ll take it.

Overall, the Isotopes seem to have an interesting collection of experienced – though not that exciting – pitchers, and young – and very exciting – bats. So there’s plenty of reasons to watch the ‘topes this year, considering you can expect to see at least five of these pitchers as fill-ins in LA later in the season, you can gauge the progression of Sands, Robinson, Gordon, & DeJesus, and you can root for Juan Castro to strike out every time so no one is tempted to recall him back to the big club yet again. Should be a fun season.

******

Where’s Josh Lindblom? He’s not listed on the Isotope roster, nor does he appear on the AA roster of the Chattanooga Lookouts (which does feature Rubby De La Rosa and Chris Withrow, among others). He pitched just two innings in big league camp, though I don’t recall hearing about any injury. My guess, for the moment, is that he’s going to remain in Arizona getting some work in until a roster spot opens up with the Isotopes.

(Update: lovely blog commenter c.lo points out that Lindblom is indeed on the updated AA roster. That can mean one of two things; either that it’s a procedural thing, and he is just getting some extra work in Arizona without taking up an AAA roster spot, or that his 2010 – 6.54 ERA, 13.5 hits/9 – was so dreadful that he’s being demoted back to AA for the first time since 2008.)

Matt Kemp & Aubrey Huff Lead Dodgers Over Giants

April 3, 2011 at 8:22 pm | Posted in Jonathan Broxton, Matt Kemp | 29 Comments

(Obligatory: Hiroki Kuroda threw his last pitch of the game without the lead. He still ends up with his name in the win column. Hooray, wins!)

Look, far be it from me to try to talk the Giants out of doing something that actively harms their chances of winning, but they have simply got to get Aubrey Huff out of right field before the man kills himself. The books will say that the Dodgers had two RBI triples, but in reality both were due to hilariously poor fielding attempts by Huff. After Rafael Furcal singled to lead off the game, the first run came on Carroll’s liner right at Huff, which skipped past him to the wall for a triple. Matt Kemp continued his quest to destroy the world by following with a homer to plate two, making his season line .873/n²/eleventybillion.

Huff’s second mishap, in the seventh after James Loney got on with a single (against a lefty!), was even better. Marcus Thames, inexplicably allowed by Bruce Bochy to hit against a lefty in a tie game, took Dan Runzler deep to right field. It would have taken a pretty nice play by any outfielder to run it down, and the fact that Huff didn’t isn’t the issue. No, it was that Huff, slow to catch up, dove basically face-first into the wall, missing the ball completely, and allowing the hardly fleet-footed Thames to motor into 3rd, scoring Loney. Aaron Miles (!), Furcal, and Andre Ethier followed with run-scoring hits, but the damage was done. Hilariously, neither ball was ruled an error, so Barry Zito and Runzler had to eat all the damage as hits and earned runs. I look forward to Brandon Belt getting demoted not because he’s not producing, but just so the Giants can stick Huff back at first base.

In between, Hiroki Kuroda threw an effective seven innings, allowing three single runs (one on a Pablo Sandoval homer that was simply crushed), striking out five without issuing a walk. The bullpen did their best to make it interesting – Hong-Chih Kuo and Matt Guerrier allowed three walks and a hit in the 8th, with Guerrier walking in a run with the bases loaded – before Jonathan Broxton came on for his third save chance of the series.

Now, Broxton converted, but he did give up a homer to Aaron Rowand, and you best believe you’ll be hearing plenty about that, particularly with tomorrow being an off-day. I won’t act as though allowing two dingers in three games isn’t concerning, because it is. If you want to argue that he’s not striking people out, he’s not the same as he once was, that’s fine; my response would just be that he’d put up the same results in the 7th or 8th inning as he does in the 9th. The Rowand homer, by the way, was due to poor pitch selection; Rowand is coming off a dreadful year in which he hit just .230/.281/.378 and clearly didn’t have the bat speed to deal with Broxton’s heat. While I’ve generally been in favor of Broxton mixing up his pitches a bit more and not only pumping in fastballs, that’s not the case with a slow bat like Rowand – giving him a breaking pitch was a gift, and Rowand took advantage.

Broxton still has much to prove, no doubt. He’s also converted three saves in the first four games, and that ought to at least help with the self-esteem. Anyway, now the first series is out of the way with three wins over the Giants, and confidence has to be pretty high, right? Kemp’s been otherwordly, Broxton’s gotten the job done, and I think this is a start we’d all have taken ten times out of ten. There’s certainly questions, to be sure, namely “will there be any offense that isn’t generated by Kemp or gifted by the San Francisco defense?”, but for now I’ll gladly keep on the blue-colored glasses and push those questions off for another day.

******

This isn’t really something we didn’t know before, but Ken Gurnick is reporting that the start for next Sunday’s game against San Diego is still up in the air between Tim Redding, John Ely, and Jon Garland. If Garland can prove his health, he’s the obvious choice (besides, you love to get him as many Petco starts as you can), but if not, I can’t come up with a single reason to choose Redding over Ely. Ely’s on the 40-man, while Redding is not, so you’d not only have to DFA someone to bring up Redding, you’d have to guarantee his $750,000 salary. For what’s likely to be just a single start, seems a lot easier to use Ely, no? Hopefully Garland can go and it’s not even a question.

In the same piece, Gurnick notes that Casey Blake is pushing to be activated for Wednesday’s game in Colorado, which would almost certainly result in Ivan DeJesus being returned to AAA. With a day off on Thursday and questionable early-season weather in Denver (they got snowed out today), it’d almost seem to make sense to just wait until Saturday in San Diego. Either way, DeJesus has done little to prove he belongs so far, so the move will be welcomed.

Giants 10, Isotopes 0

April 2, 2011 at 4:24 pm | Posted in Kenley Jansen, Ted Lilly | 22 Comments

On an afternoon where the Dodgers ran out a lineup that featured only three of their usual starters, Ted Lilly was going to have to be all but perfect to outduel Matt Cain. That worked out more or less okay until the fifth inning, when Lilly allowed four runs to score on four singles and a balk, and that was that. Mike MacDougal, Kenley Jansen, and Lance Cormier all made their season debuts to finish out the loss. Cormier just barely managed to get through the final three innings, thus sparing us the entertainment value of seeing A.J. Ellis come in to relieve him.

Not that it really mattered, of course, because the JV offense managed just five hits off Cain – two of which didn’t even leave the infield. (Though it should be noted that Matt Kemp did continue his nice start with a hard-hit double to the gap, and that Andre Ethier eventually collected three singles.) If this post seems to be lacking gusto, well, it wasn’t a very exciting game.

Particularly troubling was Jansen’s disastrous sixth inning. After issuing a walk to Brandon Belt, his outing went RBI double, popout, walk, single (which could have easily been an error on Aaron Miles), RBI single, RBI single, strikeout, strikeout. It took him 42 pitches to get three outs, and he walks away with an ERA of 54. As I noted on Twitter at the time, because relievers generally don’t throw a ton of innings, it’ll take him weeks – if not months – to get that ERA down to a more palatable number, so even if he’s totally perfect from here on out, people will still see that high ERA on their TV graphics and think that he’s lousy. Hooray, ineffective statistics! Also not helping himself was Ivan DeJesus, who struck out twice more while going 0-4 with a throwing error.

Still, the Dodgers are guaranteed at least a series split as Hiroki Kuroda faces Barry Zito in the finale tomorrow night. Juan Uribe is expected to return to the lineup to hopefully add some much-needed offense; Ethier and James Loney are expected to go o-for-9 against the lefty.

A Day Like No Other

April 2, 2011 at 12:02 pm | Posted in Hector Gimenez | 6 Comments

I’m going to put this out there right now: no matter how many games the Dodgers play for the rest of their existence, you will never, ever see this exact lineup (even just 1-8) put together again:

1) Aaron Miles 3B
2) Ivan DeJesus 2B
3) Andre Ethier RF
4) Matt Kemp CF
5) James Loney 1B
6) Hector Gimenez C
7) Xavier Paul LF
8) Jamey Carroll SS
9) Ted Lilly P

Bask in it for a moment, would you? You’ve got Hector Gimenez, making his first career start despite making his MLB debut six years ago. You’ve got Ivan DeJesus making his second career start, and only because Juan Uribe‘s not yet ready to return. You’ve got Xavier Paul, the third different left fielder in three games. And best of all, you’ve got Aaron Miles – .311 OBP in 2010, .322 career – leading off, while Jamey Carroll – .379 in 2010, .355 career – hits 8th. Because of course he is.

I’m mostly being facetious here, because the first two games have gone better than anyone could have possibly imagined, and with injuries to Uribe and Casey Blake there’s of course going to be some varying lineups. It’s just not a lineup you would have believed in a million years had I put it out there at the beginning of camp.

On the other hand, the Giants are actually letting Miguel Tejada bat leadoff for the first time in over ten years, so there’s that. In addition to that bizarre decision, the Dodgers have this in their favor: Ethier and Loney have just crushed Matt Cain in their careers. Ethier’s at .488/.511/.561 in 47 PA, while Loney’s at .378/.439/.568 in 41 PA.

******

In sadder news, Davey Lopes has left the club for a few days due to a death in the family, reports Ken Gurnick. Everyone’s condolences are with him, of course; it’ll be interesting to see how much of his teaching Kemp retains with Dave Hansen filling in at first base instead.

So Far, So Good

April 1, 2011 at 10:14 pm | Posted in Chad Billingsley, Jonathan Broxton, Matt Kemp | 14 Comments

When Chad Billingsley threw his last pitch of tonight’s game, he was down 3-1, thanks to having earlier let a two-seam fastball drift over the fat part of the plate which Brandon Belt deposited into the bleachers. Yet you’ll see his name next to the win column in the box score. Hooray for outdated stats! Seriously, though, Billingsley was effective if not quite Kershawesque, allowing just that one mistake while otherwise holding the Giants at bay over six innings. He was followed by Blake Hawksworth, who skated by despite loading the bases in the 7th, Matt Guerrier, who had an uneventful 8th inning…

…and then Jonathan Broxton, who deserves his own goddamn paragraph. He looked totally in command tonight, blowing through the Giants on just nine pitches in the 9th. It was almost as if even he wasn’t sure to expect from himself yesterday, but once he got through that first time out, it was full speed ahead tonight. That was the Broxton we were used to seeing – and the one we weren’t sure if we’d see again.

But the story – beyond the continually inept San Francisco defense – continues to be Matt Kemp, who doubled in the first run of the game in the 3rd, made a sliding catch in the 8th, and basically manufactured the second Dodger run in the 6th inning all by himself. With the Dodgers down 1-0, he led off with a single. Marcus Thames followed by grounding out to Pablo Sandoval at third base; when Sandoval threw Thames out at first, Kemp shocked the stadium by rounding second and heading straight to third, putting himself in position to score on James Loney‘s sacrifice fly.

In previous years, it was the kind of play that would kick off a shitstorm of comments about foolish decisions on Kemp’s part. This year? When he made it safely to third, I tweeted that whatever Davey Lopes was being paid, it needed to be tripled, and I’m pretty sure that nothing I’ve ever said in that medium has ever generated such an overwhelmingly positive response. Kemp has now been on base six of his eight times up this year, and while we should be cautious not to overreact after just two games, he’s looked better than we could have ever imagined. Hey, anyone miss Joe Torre and Bob Schaefer and Larry Bowa? Yeah, me neither.

The Giants, of course, did their best to contribute, because the two runs that came in after Kemp in the 6th did so largely thanks to a throwing error by Sandoval and a fielding gaffe by Jonathan Sanchez. Of the six runs the Dodgers have scored so far, only three have been earned.

Finally, a fond farewell to Ivan DeJesus, who didn’t put the ball in play once in four at-bats, striking out three times with a walk. I’m joking, of course, but not really. Casey Blake is reportedly playing without pain in Arizona and should be back soon, but the team desperately needs another righty bat beyond him. As absolutely no one could have predicted, Loney and Andre Ethier saw nothing but lefties all night, and combined to go 0-for-7. Jay Gibbons is probably not the solution to that particular problem.

Still, things couldn’t have gotten off to a more fortuitious start, right? Two wins for the Dodgers, two losses for the Giants, one loss for the Rockies, two successful saves for Broxton, and massively impressive output from Kemp. Sure, at some point they’re going to have to find some offense that isn’t either hand-delivered by the opposition or is only coming from Kemp, but it’s all fun so far, right?

******

By my count, six different Dodgers made their team debuts tonight: Hector Gimenez, DeJesus, Thames, Aaron Miles, Guerrier, and Hawksworth. I have absolutely no idea if that’s a record – probably not – but it sure seems like a lot.

The Dawn Of the Ivan DeJesus, Jr. Era

April 1, 2011 at 3:29 pm | Posted in Chad Billingsley, Ivan DeJesus | 6 Comments

Okay, not really, since he’s almost certain to get sent down when Casey Blake returns sometime next week. Still, if he can get off to a good start and somehow grab at least a share of the 2B job, we’re that much closer to seeing Uribe stay at 3B (his better position) and having Blake off the bench (his only position).

With lefty Jonathan Sanchez on the mound, Tony Gwynn takes a seat in favor of Marcus Thames, also making his Dodger debut. Unfortunately, there’s no righty bats to take over for Andre Ethier (4 hits, 8/0 K/BB in 25 PA against Sanchez) or James Loney (4 hits, 6/0 K/BB in 26 PA). At least Matt Kemp‘s had success, with a .952 OPS in 29 tries against the San Francisco lefty.

On the other side, the newly enriched Chad Billingsley has made 15 starts against the Giants and made it through six or more innings in 12 of them. It’s actually better than it looks though, because two of the three he didn’t go six came in 2006 and 2007, which is practically ancient history at this point.

In fact, three of Billingsley’s top five career performances (based on Game Score) have come against the Giants – complete-game shutouts in 2008 and 2010, and eight innings without allowing an earned run last September. He’s particularly vexed Pablo Sandoval and Freddy Sanchez, who have combined to get on base just 12 times in 56 plate appearances against him.

~~The lineup~~ (note: an updated lineup was just released with Juan Uribe benched and Aaron Miles included. Dylan Hernandez reports that Uribe’s left elbow is sore after being hit by Tim Lincecum yesterday.)

1. Rafael Furcal SS

2. Ivan DeJesus, Jr. 2B

3. Andre Ethier RF

4. Matt Kemp CF

5. Juan Uribe 3B Marcus Thames LF

6. James Loney 1B

7. Marcus Thames LF Rod Barajas C

8. Rod Barajas C Aaron Miles 3B

9. Chad Billingsley P

Don’t get used to game thread posts, by the way, since I generally don’t do them; that said, I do plan on being around for the games on both Saturday and Sunday, so I’ll probably keep it up through the weekend.