weaver myers
4-11, 6.32 6-5, 3.57
since joining the cardinals, jeff weaver has struck out just 4 men in 15.1 innings . . . and allowed 4 home runs. bad ratio. he did look sharper to me in his last game, and i'm hoping (perhaps irrationally) for a significant step forward tonight -- like, say, an outing that passes the "quality start" test (6 or more innings, 3 or fewer earned runs). he's prob'y only got two, maybe three chances left; mulder's return looms, and the cardinals are still out there shopping for arms. if weaver wants to last out the season, he'd best show that he can contribute . . . . .
cardinal fans aren't the only ones vexed by their team's deadline trades (or lack thereof). the grumps are abroad even in beaneland:
If this all works out and the A's do make the postseason, well, all to the good. They won't have the wherewithal to face down any of the other five powers (New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago or Minnesota) in the playoffs, and Beane will have to address that chronic shortcoming when it rears its spiny ahead again.
But if they come up short, the obvious excuses (injuries, so-so years from Bobby Crosby, Nick Swisher, Eric Chavez, Huston Street, Barry Zito, et. al.) won't be sufficient. The A's will be a team that did not meet the expectations of Beane's acolytes in the media and in the chat rooms, and the absence of that voodoo that he do at the deadline will seem more curious than justifiable. And then people will wonder if his head and heart were fully in this season.
thus spake ray ratto, in the s.f. chronicle. and here's theo epstein chronicler seth mnooking, talking about the red sox's
non-trades of 2006:
The proposed Andruw Jones deal that got so much attention yesterday-in which the Red Sox would give up Coco Crisp, Craig Hansen, and Jon Lester-never was much of a possibility. The one deal that Sox were most eager to make, where Boston would get Houston's Roy Oswalt in return for a group of players including some combination of Lester, Hansen, and Manny Delcarmen, didn't work out in the end because Epstein and the Red Sox refused to give up more than they felt Oswalt was worth. This year, the Red Sox weren't going to be caught up in the frenzy of the day or consumed by a need to counter the Yankees' pick-up of Bobby Abreu. An Oswalt acquisition, one article said, "[w]ould have been the classic `take that' response to the Yankees"...which is precisely what the Sox were trying to avoid.
fans like action, but front offices increasingly must proceed with great caution; gms can't play hunches anymore, because the costs of a misstep are too high in the moneyball era. most of'm more or less fit the description of theo epstein that mnooking presents -- preoccupied with "process," seemingly more focused on how the front office grades out than on how many games the team wins.
judging from the frustration being voiced by partisans of almost every team, this strikes me as part and parcel of the overall dislocation many fans are feeling as the game they love evolves.
