6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: UTK Quick Hits

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Monday, August 01, 2005

UTK Quick Hits

From today's UTK:

The key to the NL West lies in one man's wrist. J.D. Drew is a significant enough hitter that even without seeing Tom Gorman's calculations, I'm confident that a month, perhaps a bit more, of Drew in the Dodger lineup will tip the balance of the pro-mediocrity division. Drew believes there's a chance that he'll be back at the end of August, something that meshes well with what we know of similar injuries. He's been just slightly ahead of the normal rehab schedule; soon, we should be looking for reports that Drew is hitting off a tee. The Dodgers will swap out players from the DL. Jose Valentin is back from the DL after a couple months' rehab on his injured knee while Jayson Werth is headed onto the DL with knee problems of his own. Werth has lost range of motion in the knee and will have further tests to determine the extent of the damage.
Adam Eaton was activated from the DL and sent to the bullpen, where his lack of game-ready breaking stuff is supposed to not be an issue. I'd love to see a list of what type of success he had during at-bats where he didn't use a breaking ball or the percentage of his outs that came on a breaking pitch. I'll assume that the Padres know what they're doing here.
The Mariners' various transactions seem to indicate that Felix Hernandez will make his debut soon, perhaps as early as Thursday. Like many of you, I'm anxiously awaiting a good look at his mechanics.
Update: Apparently among those roster moves was the release of Aaron Sele. RHP Jorge Campillo was called up from AAA Tacoma to replace him in a start Tuesday against Detroit.
Update 2: The coming meltdown of the A's rotation? Jebus X. Christ, how could I have missed this? Carroll notes that three of the A's rotation -- Dan Haren, Joe Blanton, and Kirk Saarloos -- will cross the 150 major league innings pitched mark for the first time. There's no clear reason why, but rookie pitchers in the majors tend to come unglued after that threshold. Also, pitchers tend to get injured generally if they have a large increase in innings from year to year. Haren, too, is on that list, on target to quadruple his seasonal IP. On the other hand, Washburn will increase his IP to around 200 if he keeps up his current pace, which could cause significant trouble.