You have to remember that Pena is five times a better athelite than Gobble. Saying that Pena is the best fielding pitcher is baseball is not a streach.

*If someone calls “this pitch” when the scoreboard says 2-1, but it’s actually 3-0 and the hitter is taking all the way…do you get your “this pitch” call back for that inning?

The problem with most managers doing this is that they just go “Lefty batter, so I need a lefty pitcher” then grab their lefty pitcher, even if he’s the kind of pitcher who allows a .900 OPS against lefties.

If managers would just take FIVE SECONDS PER PLAYER to study their statistics, and realize, “hey, Pitcher A is significantly better against lefties over a significant sample size, so I need to use him against lefties!” then we’d all be perfectly happy about “playing the matchups.”

Trey Hillman doesn’t do this, but he apparently doesn’t have ANY system at all. I think he just brings out the guy whose name he remembers at that point.

(which, by itself, is still a better system than what Dusty Baker runs, which is “make shit up to justify my idiot moves.”)

The problem with all this is that they have now put him on the DL for reasons that I question which has prevented him from being traded by the deadline if I’m not mistaken. I believe that he was placed on the DL to enable us to retrieve Peralta who we had just sent down. It appears that the Royals have totally given up on Neal Musser as they refuse to use him.

With Pena, I’m going to assume that we can put him on waivers and when he clears them, we can then put him down on the farm and turn him into a pitcher. He’ll never be a major league ball player except for the Royals. Normally, I would laugh at this idea and all the excitement being shown over his night on the mound but he showed somethings that you just don’t see normally. Some position players have a neat little curve they throw or get a little movement on their fastball but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one who gets a good breaking pitch, a fastball with movement, and does it all while throwing that fastball in the 90s.

Facing the first batter, he looked like he was just sort of tossing it up there and you could see it in his velocity which was only about 88mph then. After that first play off the mound, he started using more of a windup it appeared and his velocity increased by 3-4mph.

I was saying get rid of him a couple of months ago. Now we have to get him to the minors to see what he can do. My only worry is that we are able to do that without another team moving in as he is out of options. It is clear that his value as a position player is non-existent and that the Royals believe this themselves. Other than 3 games he played in at the beginning of July when Aviles looked like he was cooling off drastically, he has played in two games since June 25. Those two games were a 9-1 win and a 19-4 loss. We have played in three one run wins that he did not play in at all. We have played three other games that were save situations and he did not play in those either. Therefore, it appears that the Royals feel he isn’t even worth his value as a defensive replacement.

1988 – the 19 inning Atlanta-St.Louis game.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN198805140.shtml

Jose Oquendo pitched 4 innings and took the loss, giving up 2 in the top of the 19th.

Jose DeLeon played 4 innings in the OF, swapping between RF and LF with Tom Brunansky 11 times over those innings.

DeLeon’s box score read:
J DeLeon LF-RF-LF-RF-LF-RF-LF-RF-LF-RF-LF-RF

And good stats! I still remember Cowens returning to the team with a clear plastic shield guarding his jaw for the rest of the season (couple that with the big ‘fro and the glasses, and he was an unusual looking guy on the baseball field that season). I think it was the same season that Gary Roenicke had the half-quarterback-facemask (think of Jim Plunkett’s old facemask, then cut it so that it only covers one side of his face) guard on his batting helmet protecting his jaw. It (a ball player with a broken jaw) seemed to be too rare a problem to have two completely different solutions.

There are only so many excuses that one can come up with before coming to the conclusion that he’s just not that good.

May 8, 1979. Farmer nailed White with the first pitch of the game. Frank missed 33 games, Cowens 21. Just horrible. The worst part? He still didn’t even get ejected after taking Cowens out; two batters later he threw a wild pitch, and Pat Corrales finally yanked him for Jim Kern.

Royals went 13-9 without Cowens; 18-16 without Frank.

I am a little surprised with you on this one. You like managers having a hands off approach and playing hunches with relievers? Then you go on to explain several different disasterous hunches played by Hillman this year. I also thought that without your developing “statistical” background would lead you the other direction. If a manager just plays hunches and ignores the stats it’s kind of like hitting on 16 in blackjack no matter what. you’ll win some, you’ll lose some and in the end the odds (and statistical evidence) are probably against you when you do something different every time.