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Thursday, December 30, 2004 |
Wait Til What Year?
I'm told that it's raining in LA, which is just as well; no baseball anywhere to be had anyway. In Seattle, where it always rains, the winners of the Beltre sweepstakes conjugate uncreated words, searching for the perfect verb for the act of overestimating a team's offseason improvement. The Mariners' pitching, for starters, is a mess:
Our rotation is currently comprised of (1) a 26 year old coming off a 4.67 ERA and arm problems, masquerading as an ace, (2) a 42 year old finesse southpaw who had a historically bad HR/9 ratio last season, (3) a right-handed enigma whose actual ability is overstated, and who has a career 4.58 ERA, (4) an Indy League workhorse with 88 ML innings under his belt, and (5) a replacement-level arm due to earn eight times the amount of his equivalently-talented brethren next year. The bullpen’s also got a series of question marks, with Soriano likely missing all of 2005 after surgery and Guardado trying to let his shoulder heal instead of going under the knife.This is exactly the kind of mental calculation I find myself doing when thinking about the Dodgers. Now it's possible that DePodesta has some trades in mind before opening day, but time grows short; pitchers and catchers (for the Cubs, anyway, and I imagine the Dodgers have a similar schedule) report February 16th. Minus Lima, minus Perez, the Dodgers' rotation grows rather worse, resigning risks or no; and while Perez's absence isn't yet a certainty, the absence of discussion is so far an indicator that DePodesta's going to let him walk -- the same as with Beltre. If the Dodgers plan on contending, I think it's reasonable to ask, given this tortuous offseason -- in what year?The pitching staff, as it stands at this writing, probably belongs in the lower middle class of the AL, with the potential to hover around league-average if a few things break the right way.
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