Ugh... giving Altuve a day off after 3 games... would have been nice to see both him AND Lyles out there today. Instead we get the lovely Matt Downs.
Love games at Wrigley but have never liked the 1:20 start times...50 minute pregame show is NOT needed.
I love day games I didnt know but apparently the owner can control that(?). I hope Crane adds more days games(though I doubt it).
Barmes has turned into a nice SS, should bring back a nice B level prospect or bridge the gap to Villar/Mier.
lol... you couldn't stop slamming him for weeks on end. He's the same hitter/player he was before the season for the most part. That's why you don't overreact to small sample sizes. He is what he is at this age and stage of his career... nothing special but not as bad as he looked early on. Pence took one of the most controlled swings I've seen him take in a while on that hit just now.
He was hitting around .200 for most of the first half of the season, should have been getting slammed. I think I said something like if you can't hit then you better play top-level SS which he did minus that game in Toronto. Brewers should look into Barmes, they have enough offense so a defensive option at SS would help the pitching staff.
My point is that he didn't "turn into" anything. Every season at about the halfway point, you'll find a ton of established players whose numbers are off in one direction or the other and a lot of those numbers get corrected as the sample size increases. We knew who Barmes was. It was only a matter of time for him to improve a little. He still isn't a good hitter but he isn't as bad as his numbers reflected early on.
Odds were that Lyles was going to give up a lot of hits, not just cuz he's a rook. Numbers suggested it.
Ah, I see what you mean, my bad. I didn't expect much offensively from him but early on he was worse then I imagined. Always thought his defense was top notch and he hasn't disappointed. I did think that with the pitching being so bad, we might need more offense and sacrifice some defense. I guess I should have used the phrase "turned his season around," instead.
Here's the boxscore for the game where Bagwell hit 2 HRs in 1 inning (3 total in the game): http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/HOU/HOU199406240.shtml
Seems like we've left a lot of RISP in this series. Oh, wait... we did. Let's see if we can come through here.
I like what JD just said about CLee...he is going to have to start to cheat a bit more instead of just taking so many pitches. He has lost bat speed and needs to take more chances. Singles are nice but he needs to provide some pop and turn those warning track fly balls into 1st row shots.
My problem with Lee throughout his career has been that he didn't take enough pitches, even as a cleanup guy. I've always thought that he actually had a good eye despite the mediocre-at-best walk rates. Having said that, it couldn't hurt to selectively try to get out in front of some balls. I do like the patience he's been showing recently though, not that it matters at this point. What has separated Lee from truly elite hitters has been his unimpressive walk rates and good but not great slugging ability. If he was going to be a slugger, he needed to do more of it to compensate for being a very average OBP guy.
Guess who is now a .300 hitter with an OBP of almost .360??? Curious why his name hasn't come up more in trade gossip.
