Drastic Times Call for What?
Drastic Measures! Yes! Who said that?
I did. Now, I don’t know the game of baseball the way the experts do. I’ve never been a player (beyond age 13) and I’ve never been a coach (beyond assistant-coaching a girls’ team way back in the day). But I do know a few things.
1) Good teams don’t have this many losing streaks. Did you know the Tigers have lost 3 or more straight games SEVEN times already this year? Fortunately they have had nearly that many winning streaks (6) as well. Still, too many skids mean that there is simply no way they can win the pennant.
2) Their road record is abominable. As of today’s action, the team is a brutal 12-25-1 on the road. Their home record is a strong 24-12-0, though, which puts them just a game under .500 on the year. But there’s something about batting first that brings this team to its knees too often.
3) They’ve lost way more blowouts than they’ve won. If we count a 4+ run win as a blowout, the team has won just 5 of those all year, while losing an amazing 19. Perhaps the mark of a good team is one that wins close games though. But in one-run games, they are just 13-12, which really is not amazing (nor is it lucky, I suppose). The bottom line: they give up way too many runs and score way too few.
4) They blow leads like no other team. I don’t have full numbers, but Seung-hwan Oh has blown 4 games already this year. He blew 6 all of last year. His ERA in the last 31 days is a mediocre 4.70 despite giving up runs in just 3 of 13 appearances. He is not the lone reliever who has coughed up leads and lost games, though. In the past month, Shinobu Fukuhara has done it twice and Yuya Andoh has done it once as well. The starters have had terrible outings and the rest of the middle relievers have given up their share of runs, too.
With these things in mind, I propose the following:
If things do not improve in July, send our closer down to the farm and let him learn a new pitch or two, so he can stop serving up beach balls to our opponents late in games. Call up newcomer Nelson Perez to fill the foreigner quota. And here’s some of my logic for waiting.
The Tigers play 14 of their next 19 at home. Their home record is decent. Bringing Perez in to play center field at vast Koshien would be a baptism by fire… he’s not a natural center fielder anyways. So you wait until August 4, when the team plays the entire month away from Koshien. Then you either put Perez or Kosuke Fukudome in center, where our team has had awful production all year. Now the batting lineup features 3 foreigners and has no real easy outs, other than pitcher (and catcher, unless Ryutaro Umeno gets more playing time). You could also make manager Wada drool by starting an alternating left-right lineup: Toritani L – Uemoto R – Fukudome L – Gomez R – Perez L – Murton R – Imanari L – catcher R – pitcher.
The Tigers sorely lack power, and while Perez is still unproven, perhaps this month would be enough to prepare him for the bigs. (Mind you, through 5 games he is hitting .368 for the farm team.) He apparently said Koshien Stadium was a “small park” but of course talk is cheap. He does boast good power, and even if he does not live up to his own hype, his presence could give opposing pitchers one more big bat to worry about. The long August “road of death” (all games away from Koshien until the 29th) would be a little more bearable if the team started making some noise with their bats.
No matter how you look at it, this team will not win the pennant as it is now. It needs a catalyst of some sort, and in my opinion, it can only come from the batters, who need to wake out of their season-long slumber. Sacrificing Oh would take a lot of guts on the team’s part, but if they sent Randy Messenger down for his 5.88 ERA through 6 weeks… why not do the same thing to your closer? What’s the worst that could happen? Someone else comes in and blows games? For the record, Messenger has come back on fire, lowering his ERA to 3.30 in 6 starts since being recalled.
First thing they need to do is switch Yamato and Toritani in the lineup. They are giving away plate appearances to a guy currently hitting below the Mendoza line. Coming into today’s game Yamato had an anemic OPS of .457, while Toritani had quite respectable .733, for a difference of .276 OPS.
Over the course of an NPB season, the 2-hole will see around 75 more plate appearances than the 7-hole. With that in mind, why is Wada giving those extra PAs to Yamato instead of Toritani? Swapping them would give the captain more opportunities to make a difference, and perhaps more importantly, give Yamato fewer opportunities to kill a rally. Who knows, they might even decide to not bunt when Uemoto reaches 1st to open an inning.
Nah. That’s asking way too much.