Have you seen Cash's career numbers? He is far worse of a hitter than Q or Towles. The primary reason for sending Towles down was due to his inability to call games. Neither Q or Cash are better hitters. Here are their career and current season OPS: Towles: .600 (.554 in 2010) Quintero: .593 (.495 in 2010) Cash: .535 (no ML data for 2010, a paltry .382 at RR) As bad as Towles has hit in what has still been a small sample size, he has been better than Q and a lot better than Cash. Add in that Towles was a far better hitter than either of them at the lower levels and it's clear that he's the best hitter of the 3. The fact of the matter is that the most important job of a catcher is to catch. I'm not sure if you were making that point in your argument with The Cat but from the few posts that I recall, you were always talking about offense. If Towles could catch as well as Q and Cash, he would be getting the majority of starts until Castro is ready because he is the better hitter of the 3.
no, no, no. scroll back and know what you are talking about if you are going to interject yourself into this argument please. i said he was awful defensively (and offensively, but, for your purposes, we'll let that be secondary right now). then he said that he was a + defensive player and that I had no idea what i was talking about, because he remembered some lawyer's blog and remember hearing 15 other people and scouts saying that Towles was good defensively. But the reason he was sent down was for a combination of reasons that he sucks. He's good at nothing. I am correct when I am telling you this: if he was hitting .300 with 20 rbi's and 5 hr's, he would not have been sent down to AA. he was sent down because he is terrible, both offensively and defensively. period.
Fair enough. I shouldn't have gotten into this without reading the whole argument. I agree with what you are saying in this post, particularly that if his offense was good enough, they would have found a way to live with his defensive shortcomings. He has only been hitting slightly better than Q and that isn't enough to justify keeping him around.
WTF? When did I ever think, or imply I thought that? Can you provide any evidence of that at all? What the Astros do has little to do with my thoughts on the situation - this is arguably the worst-run team in professional sports and most of us have grown to expect silly, knee-jerk moves. What I said was that over the course of a full season, he'd produce close to league-average catching numbers. As of one week ago, he was above the .700 OPS mark for the season, in that general area I told you about and producing better than any Astros' catcher on offense in recent memory. One bad week later, and he's demoted. That's the silliness of this franchise, and why I don't tie my opinions to what they do. My opinions were on what Towles would do if he were given the season (or at least a reasonable part of it) of major-league at-bats. Also, defense and "calling games" are somewhat different things. His defense had been improving rapidly of late by any measure, culminated by the multiple runners he threw out attempting to steal last week. Calling games? I'm still not convinced he's a bad game-caller because of one anonymously-sourced blog from Greg Lucas, but regardless, unless you're a pitcher or someone who routinely talks to the starting pitchers, you're not really in a great position to judge a catcher as a game-caller. In other words, you were throwing **** at a wall to see what stuck. If the Lucas blog is accurate, I congratulate you for a lucky guess, but I don't take it seriously. I look forward to the day Towles is finally traded from this organization and can show some of you just how much of a joke the braintrust of this franchise is right now.
I can't believe you two are actually having an argument over Towles and Quintero. They both are on a god awful team, neither one of them is a serious game changer to the team. The difference between them is marginal. I'd take Q simply because I personally believe he is a better defensive catcher, but they both suck. The last good catcher we had was big bad Brad. I hope a twins fan finds these posts and dies laughing.
Cat, What other possible reason could they have for sending down Towles? It has to be something not related to hitting. Q and Cash or both clearly worse hitters. They aren't bringing Cash up because of his bat. He's a worse hitter than even Q.
ha, so now we have to wait for him to be traded and wait an indeterminate amount of years down the line to properly evaluate towles. sad. not being able to ever admit when you're wrong is such an awful character flaw to have.
I'm sure that's part of it, but this organization, among its many flaws, always has to have a scapegoat. If you look in the Wade era specifically, you'll see dozens of relatively minor demotions in losing skids. This is trying to tell Drayton - and to a less extent, fans - that someone is being held accountable. Drayton still breathes the "we are trying to be a champion" nonsense on a daily basis. He doesn't get it. He won't. Towles is a lightning rod for criticism because he had somewhat high expectations. Even a week ago, when Towles' hitting numbers were fine, fans generally disliked Towles and liked Quintero, because of their performance relative to expectations. Also, the fact that Oswalt had significant issues with Towles smells funny, given that Oswalt is pitching his best season in years and one of the best in his entire career - with Towles behind the dish on all but one start. All that said, yes, I'm sure there's some truth to the game-calling talk. But as someone who's spent some time around this organization, I can promise you - with a season as bad as this one, they're always looking for someone to scapegoat and some way to catch lightning in a bottle. It's a bigger factor than you think.
It's not nearly as bad of a character flaw as drawing definitive conclusions based on an absurdly small sample size.
i'm just about finished with this, because your baseless claims like this really have gotten old. Just a bizarre, bizarre statement to make (up).
Are you in the press box on a semi-regular basis and listening to the reactions players draw from fans when they're announced? I didn't think so... Also, "like this"? It's quite ironic to accuse someone of making multiple baseless claims, then provide no examples besides the one disputed here.
Crawfish Boxes (the best 'Stros blog on the web) sums it up fairly well. Comments are spot on also. http://www.crawfishboxes.com/2010/5/4/1458586/j-r-towles-headed-to-corpus-astros
Interesting read, Cat. Thanks for the link. That's insane of they call up Castro this sesaon. Dude is less ready than Towles, offensively and behind the plate. That would reek of trying to cater to impatient fans and trying to sell a few extra tickets at the expense of our top catching prospect.
