1. We need more hitting. Rocchio is hot right now and he should come up and Clement should go back down. It would be nice to bring up Brennan but, unless we DFA Clement or Miller, I don't see that happening. The only other thing I can see us doing is to bring up Valera and send down Straw, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle. I think they would send down Benson instead of Straw but Straw's offensive stats say that he should be hitting 10th in the lineup...and there are only 9 spots in the lineup.
2. I think the FO and Tito need to react more quickly. When Plesac and Civale went down and we had to bring up Morris, I think Shaw should have been the opener to give Morris a little breather before his first ML appearance and simulate more of what he was doing in the minors: relieving. The FO plan was too one-dimensional on this decision, and I think it helped cost us that game.
3. This is a long season and no one knows, when you have a slump like we are in, when and under what conditions it will end. No team is immune to these things and there are some epic fail examples of where teams lost playoff spots by having one of these slumps at the wrong time. All we can do as fans is to keep watching, keep cheering and rooting our team on. The rest, as they say, has to be done by the team and the management, itself. As Kim Carnes says: I need a hero!
4. It looks like we will have at the most two of our minor league teams in the playoffs, Lynchburg and Lake County. Akron blew it in the first half and Columbus just can't make up any ground with Nashville as that 3-4 game deficit is just maddeningly consistent. Still, all of our US based affiliates, combined, are 59 games over .500 at this point. For an organization that is all about development and, in many cases, about having underage rosters at most levels, having this kind of cumulative record is a very good sign.
Keep the faith, baby. If good things are supposed to happen, with us behind our team, they will.
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