how stupid the Reds are right now. Why Corey Patterson (.248 OBP) didn’t get the hook when a hot shot OF is called up is beyond comprehension.

He’s hitting .197, so I think it’s safe to say he isn’t really close to being major league-ready. If you’re going to call up an outfielder, it’s clearly Mather.

Dusty and Baker are the two words, while the phrase is “clog the bases.”

Dusty Baker believes that high OBP guys with average or worse speed are bad because they “clog the bases.” He’d rather have a fast guy like Corey Patterson who makes a bazonkers amount of outs, but doesn’t “clog the bases” due to his high amount of speed (but in reality mostly due to the fact that one must get on base to “clog said bases”).

Anywho, hiring Dusty Baker was close to the stupidest thing a rebuilding franchise could do. Here’s a list of some of the dumber things the man has done in his brief time as Redleg Manager

• Say that Joey Votto, a guy with a .538 slugging percentage as a professional baseball player, needed to change his approach at the plate and take FEWER pitches.
• He said a similar thing with Adam Dunn (a guy whose biggest issue is large swing holes, not his approach), whose career OBP has never dipped below .354, and who has hit 252 professional home runs. But, shit, he strikes out two or three times in Wednesday night games in Philadelphia. Fuck him, that guy stinks and needs to be more like Tsuyoshi Shinjo, who inexplicably got 362 at bats for the 2002 Giants, but only K’ed 47 times. That warrior.
• Had Adam Dunn and Edwin Encarnacion sac bunt, even though the two of them have a combined 2 sac bunts or something in their careers. Then, after Dunn hit a walkoff bomb to win the game after fouling off two of those bunts, Baker said that he had hoped Encarnacion would eff up the first two bunts, then hit a bomb to win the game…Huh?
• He also said he was thrilled when Encarnacion got a big hit because he “bleeds internally big time.”
• He also broke tremendous grounds by saying that he was big on driving in runs and scoring them. He’s the only person to ever think that, I think.

As a nasty little sidenote: On a team with Homer Bailey in the pipeline, and with Edinson Volquez and Johnny Cueto on the squad, the Reds failed to remember how Dusty helped to hasten the end of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood’s careers as starting pitchers, claiming that how a guy was throwing was more important then the number of pitches and that everyone should just shut up about how he made Prior throw about 500 pitches every game. Prior and Wood were probably going down eventually, but leading the earth in pitcher-abuse points surely didn’t help them.