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Jeff Fletcher | April 30, 2010
In case you missed it, Brian Wilson couldn’t pitch tonight because he tweaked his groin while playing catch before the game. He said he doesn’t think it’s serious. Didn’t sound worried at all.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the whole unfiltered interview he just did.
Jeff Fletcher | April 30, 2010
Just talked to a couple of scouts who made recent passes through Fresno. They report that Madison Bumgarner is better, but still not ready. In fact, none of the pitchers at Fresno are ready to come up and help the Giants, one scout said.
As for Posey, he’s looking pretty good, but this scout said that he doesn’t think it would be a good idea for the Giants to bring him up. He said Posey has a chance to be an above average catcher who can hit, and the Giants could jeopardize that if they sacrifice his time developing as a catcher to have him in the big leagues catching once a week and playing first base.
He also said that Posey has pretty good power potential, but right now he’s not ready to bring it into games.
The scout said Posey seems to have pretty good instincts behind the plate, evident by one time that he took his time throwing out a would-be base-stealer because he was aware enough to see that the runner stumbled on his way to second. Other scouts were not impressed with Posey’s 2.1-second time (catcher should generally be under two seconds), but this scout said Posey made a slower, accurate throw because he knew he had time.
Jeff Fletcher | April 28, 2010
I was looking up some numbers after today’s tough Giants loss, and I came upon this little stunner:
Brian Wilson is very tough on lefties.
Since the start of the 2009 season, he’s held lefties to a .176 average. Tim Lincecum, by contrast, has held lefties to just a .208 average over that span. Lincecum is a little better against righties (.200) and Wilson is much worse against righties (.250) over that span.
Considering that Chase Utley and Ryan Howard were looming (right after Placido Polanco) when Bochy lifted Lincecum in favor of Wilson, I suspect that may have been one of his reasons. (Since it wasn’t mentioned in the stories I’ve read so far, I’m guessing no one asked Bochy about that. I didn’t cover the game today.)
Jeff Fletcher | April 28, 2010
Just a reminder to anyone who is thinking that the service-time threshold for Buster Posey avoiding Super Two status will be passing in May: It won’t.
Did you forget that he had 33 days of service time at the end last season? (It would be easy to forget, since he only had 17 at-bats.)
Super Twos (players who are arbitration-eligible with less than three years of service time) are normally guys who have about 2 years and 140 days of service time or more, although it could be as low as 2.120. If we assume that once Posey gets to the big leagues, he’s going to stay, he just has to have more than 120 days of service time at the end of this season to be a possible Super Two after the 2012 season.
Since Posey already has 33, it means he’s going to be in Super Two neighborhood if he gets even as little as 90 days this year. If the Giants want to be sure to avoid that, they’d have to keep him in the minors till sometime around the All-Star break.
Now, we can debate whether the Giants should even be concerned about Posey’s Super Two status. You can say they shouldn’t, and that they are penny-pinching if they are even thinking that way. However, look what happened with Tim Lincecum, who ended up being a Super Two this year by 10 days. Were those extra 10 days of Lincecum in 2007 (a year the Giants had a losing record) worth the extra $7 million or so they have to pay Lincecum in 2010?
(By the way, Lincecum is a highly unusual case because he won the Cy Young award twice. If he’d been just a normal very good pitcher, like Justin Verlander, his first-time arbitration salary would have been more like $4 million, so those 10 days didn’t cost the Giants as much as a few votes by 32 baseball writers with Cy Young ballots. A guy like Brian McCann, who is a best-case scenario for Posey, went from $800,000 to $3.5 million the first year he was arbitration eligible. That was part of a multiyear deal he signed when he was just a 1-plus player.)
Jeff Fletcher | April 28, 2010
I can’t explain exactly what an “online sentiment analysis” is, but here ya go…
The San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics have the most positive buzz of any Major League Baseball team through the first three weeks of the season, according to an online sentiment analysis by The Nielsen Company. The Giants earned a sentiment score of 4.5 (5.0 being the top score) with 20% of all online messages considered “positive,” while one percent of messages were “negative.” Similarly, the A’s earned a score of 4.2 with 18% of online messages deemed “positive” while two percent of messages were “negative.” Additional messages logged for both clubs were found to be “neutral” or “mixed.”
Jeff Fletcher | April 27, 2010
Just goofin around tonight. Doing a little test to see how video on my iPhone looks, via YouTube, on my blog. And also to see how quickly I can get it posted. Not sure what I’d do with this new technology, but it’s fun to experiment.
Jeff Fletcher | April 25, 2010
All of this talk about baseball’s unwritten rules and Braden-ARod got me thinking about the unwritten rules of being a baseball writer. Believe it or not, they do exist. Unlike baseball’s unwritten rules, which are mostly about respecting your opponents, the reporter rules are mostly about courtesy.
While I’ll invite any of my colleagues to chime in with their own rules, here are the ones I could come up with off the top of my head:
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