Shameless promotion: Marc Hulet (Battersbox.ca, bluejayway.ca and Baseball Analysts) and me will soon be launching a digital magazine about the Blue Jays farm system, so stay tuned for the first edition scheduled for the end of March.  It will be available (free of charge) on many sites, including BDD!


- Catcher Doug Mirabelli has been released by the Boston Red Sox and they are planning to designate Kevin Cash as the backup catcher.

Cash was signed as an amateur free agent in 1999 by the Toronto Blue Jays and showed promess with the bat (around .800 OPS in first three minor league seasons).  His real strength lies in a really powerful arm behind the dish and overall good receiving skills (16 errors in 335 minor league games).

However, as soon as he reaches the majors, his bat goes silent (never hit over the Mendoza line in five seasons), but his defensive prowess remain as good as shown in the lower levels of pro baseball:  he has retired 36% of all would-be stealers in the major leagues.

The projections for next year are what you'd expect, but Marcel actually sees a .246/.321/.403 line in 2008 and that would make for a better showing than any predictions for Mirabelli.

Bloggers reactions:

Over the Monster:

Ok, maybe not big news, but it has thrown a monkey wrench into our roster. I think Kevin Cash will be the backup, even though Nick Cafardo thinks Dusty Brown could take the backup job. I think that's highly unlikely though because his highest level of experience is 8 games at Pawtucket last year. But hey, George Kottaras is hitting .500 right now. Although I'm sure he won't grab the backup job out of spring, he could win a job with a solid year in Pawtucket.

Fire Brand of the American League:

Mirabelli, who hit .202/.278/.360 and had become a liability with the bat in recent years, was in uniform this morning and slated to play in a spring training game before being abruptly scratched and later released by the team.

Makes me wonder if there's something going on that we don't know about that caused Mirabelli's release… (Yesterday was the last day a player could be released with the club only on the hook for one-sixth of his salary, and now Mirabelli should get a quarter of his salary. It's possible the Red Sox released Mirabelli yesterday before the deadline but there was a communications breakdown. If that's not the case, this decision is even more curious because they could have saved some money by releasing him yesterday.)

Or is a trade on the way?

- RHP Kyle Lohse has finally found a new home in St-Louis after thinking the market would offer him a long-term deal comparable to the one Carlos Silva got in Seattle (4 year, $48 M).  Instead, he has to settle for a $4.25 M deal that ends after the 2008 season.

The Cardinals were also desperate for an arm that would give them innings and at least an average performance every five day.  The 29-year-old has thrown an average of 191 innings each year for 7 seasons in the majors, although his 4.82 ERA and 1.43 WHIP are less than stellar. 

The 29th round pick (1996) throws a fastball that tops in the low-90s, a slider, change-up and a rare curve ball.  He quit throwing his cut fastball last season.  His K/9 and BB/9 last season stood at 5.70 and 2.66 respectively.

With Chris Carpenter out until at least June and Mark Mulder possibly coming back in May, the rotations should look like this now at the beginning of April:

Adam Wainwright
Braden Looper
Joel Pineiro
Kyle Lohse
Anthony Reyes

Bloggers Reactions

Cardinals Diaspora

It's not a bad move, especially on a one year deal. At this point, warm bodies capable of pitching for 150+ innings are exactly what the Cardinals need. Win now? Pfft. Compete now? Pish posh. We need pitchers to make it through the season, and that's exactly what this is.

I'd still like to see a return to form from Anthony Reyes and some of the young arms get a shot. Hopefully, Parisi and those guys turn out performances in triple A that are impossible for the folks in STL to ignore…although if anyone can ignore fine rookie performances, it's Tony La Russa.

- Toronto Blue Jays starter Shaun Marcum, who was called upon last year to start and really made the most out of his opportunity, is working on a sinker to add to his repertoire (fastball, slider, cutter, curve and change)

"I'm trying to work on it and get it ready for the season," Marcum explained. "If it's not there, then we'll shut it down and go from there. If it's not working, it's probably not a pitch I'm going to throw Hafner during the season. I might go with what I get people out with, which is probably my changeup in that spot."

Marcum, who was scheduled to pitch four innings, saw his pitch count rise rapidly as he toyed with that two-seam sinking fastball. The 26-year-old finished with 65 pitches, including 47 strikes, and allowed five runs (three earned) on 10 hits with one strikeout and no walks in 3 2/3 innings.

Throughout his career, Marcum has typically been a fly-ball pitcher, giving him a desire to add a pitch that can induce more ground balls. The sinker that Marcum has been working on since this past offseason begins on a path toward the hips of a left-handed batter before breaking back over the plate.

It's a similar pitch to the sinker used by Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay, who is well-known for the high volume of groundouts he induces. Against the Indians, Marcum was more successful with the pitch against right-handers, but he struggled against lefties like Hafner and catcher Victor Martinez, both of whom recorded hits off the sinker.

- Patrick Sullivan examines how teams approach 3-0 counts.

I am not sure that there are conclusions to be drawn from any of this, but it sure looks interesting. What stuck out most for me were the Oakland Athletics, and what seems to be evidence of an organizational approach to hitting. We have long-known that the A's favor a patient style at the plate. A casual search looking at past articles related to Oakland's philosophical beliefs on how to approach an at-bat will yield a lot of words like "patience" and "selectivity" and "taking a walk".

It may just be semantics and not reflective of meaningful differences between the two clubs but being a Red Sox fan and living in Boston, when Theo Epstein speaks of an organizational approach, he will use a term like "strike zone management" or "pitch recognition". Oakland seems to believe that taking more pitches is an end to itself, while Boston might think that so long as you can recognize effectively a ball and a strike, aggressiveness is not necessarily a bad thing.