Great weekend, sweeping the Reds with two of the games in beautiful, standard definition television on my local cable provider’s FSN feed. As hard to imagine as it may be, Luke Hochevar’s performance Friday night may be as impressive as any of Greinke’s this season. Then again, I think the Reds were giving him a lot of help. As good as he was, 80 pitches to get 27 outs implies some guys were coming to the plate with less-than-ideal game plans.
I don’t want to complain too much after a three-game sweep,* but I was again struck by how far this franchise still has to go when I heard they were calling Tug Hulett back up after Coco Crisp went on the DL. Hulett replaces Crisp on the roster, while Mitch Maier takes over centerfield. When Mike Aviles went down, Tony Pena Jr. and Luis Hernandez took his place. These four additions have put up the following numbers in the bigs this year:
Hulett .000/.000/.000 (to be fair, he’s only had four ABs)
Maier .229/.325/.329
Pena Jr. .115/.179/.154
Hernandez .200/.259/.200.
I’m never really sure how to interpret these numbers, but I think that’s probably pretty awful.
(They could easily be on a six-game streak of the defense and bullpen hadn’t sucked it up so much in Cleveland. The offense has perked up a bit this week, though.)
For a team that has very little margin for error, you can throw in the inability to cover for injuries with players from the minors. Omaha is still awfully thin when it comes to providing depth for the big league clue.
Oh, and have I mentioned that I kind of love the Sunday baby blues? One of my goals for July is to rate every team’s uniforms, by the way. I’m sure you’ll be waiting with baited breath for that post.