Thoughts for a Wednesday Night: Baseball, Francona - Lack of Sense of the Moment, Cantillo, The Roster

 BASEBALL

Two winnable games in a row that our closer blows, piling on to our setup mean doing really badly.

14-17 record.  We could have been 1 game out as the White Sox were beatng up on the Twins.

It's just baseball.  Maybe we will pull out of it.  Maybe we won't...and we won't likely know for months yet. So, we are all here because we love baseball, we love our Guardians.  If we haven't given up after 75 years (1948) we shouldn't give up now. 

Yeah, I hate us losing to the Yankees.  We had the opportunity to pour salt in the wound of the Yankees bullpen and we messed it up.

Tomorrow morning, at 14-17, we will only be 3 games out of first place.  Rejoice that we have a division that remains winnable when we are playing mediocre baseball...just like last year.  Rejoice that in the current CBA if we win the division we get to play, in Cleveland, a best-of-three series against the least best wild card team, maybe even a team that was swooning at the end.  If we win that we get to avoid the best team in the league in the next round, only getting them in the AL Championship round.  Just like last year, the cards are stacked in our favor, as much as possible, if we just win the division.  There's still time to fix this and I hope and think that we won't have to go 24-6 in September to get back to the playoffs.  We just have to play baseball.  Good baseball.  Healthy baseball.  Even lucky baseball.  But just baseball.

FRANCONA

Don't get me wrong.  We are looking at the greatest manager in Cleveland baseball history.  Most managers with great talent just have to make sure they don't screw it up.  But Francona?  He manages when he doesn't have the best talent and finds a way to make it work.  He is simply the kind of manager who you get spoiled by.  So spoiled that when miracles do not occur, you start to nitpick him.  

So that is my disclaimer to this nitpicking post.

Francona doesn't have a sense of the moment.  He manages not to get second-guessed.  He does the safe thing.  All the time.   Here are the nits I want to pick with him.

• Bunting - He is playing the odds that a struggling offense needs goes on third with one out to score runs.  He let Tyler Freeman bunt in the 10th of a recent game, somehow expecting a good result in a pressure situation from a guy who only had 3 sacrifices in 1500 minor and major league at bats.  Francona thought he was playing it safe but, in so doing, he was not trusting that his team would find a way.  He deploys the bunt, no matter whether it makes the most sense at the time.  I think he simply sees the bunt as something that WILL be successful when, in fact, the nature of the bunt automatically makes it unsuccessful (giving up an out) even if it works.
• Leaving starters in - Look, I have seen it done with all of our starters from time to time.  But Francona does this mostly with rookies.   His ideal is for a guy to give him X innings.  It is the way his bullpen sets up.  It is part of his plan.  So he convinces himself that since a guy hasn't been bombed yet, maybe he can make it through another inning.  The other night was a good example.  Bibee was really good through 5 but you could see in the 4th and 5th that his fastball velo was dropping dramatically.  So in the 6th two mediocre fastballs later and, with help from Karinchak, the game is tied.  Bibee was great and probably felt he had had a good outing.  Taking that confidence into the next start would have been great.  But now the competition will think that if they can just get him to the 75-80 pitch mark his stuff will come back to earth and they can jump him.  They wouldn't have been able to think that if Francona deployed him properly and not like he was a former Cy Young award winner.  
• Brushing off the fairy tale moment for doing the thing that is least likely to get him second-guessed.  I remember Wilfred Brimley in the Natural saying that even though he was forced to take Roy Hobbs it didn't mean he had to play him, ever.   I thought about that when, in the 9th against the Yankees on Monday the bases were loaded and there were two outs in the 9th and Peralta was in.  David Fry was sitting on the bench, waiting for his first big league AB.  Instead, he ran Fry for Bell (totally unneded substitution) and let the season-long slumping hit for Gallagher.  It almost worked but Gonzalez got too much air under his fly ball to right field and it was caught.  I mean, even if Fry strikes out in that situation it is his chance to shine.  And he has good power to right center.   Fry is a veteran.  He desrved that chance to shine.  But by pinch-hitting the slightly more veteran Gonzalez and maybe giving him confidence if he was successful, Francona took the safe way out.  He has done this sort of thing for years, not using rookies enough or in the right way.  

JOEY CANTILLO

OK, I admit it.  Instead of watching the early innings of the Guardians game tonight I was glued to the Akron game watching Cantillo deal.  And I mean D-E-A-L.  He gave up one hit and two walks.  He recorded 15 outs.  One was on a CS.  One was on an outfield assist.  The other 13 were on Ks.  In one game he more than doubled the stikeouts in his las 3 starts combined...and that was 12 Ks in 11.3 innings so it wasn't exactly, before tonigh, chopped liver.   

So was what we saw tonight a fluke.  Was Cantillo just 'in the zone' for this one game.  Or is this what he SHOULD look like in his 3rd go-round in AA if he is the prospect we all would like to think he is.  

I don't know the answer but I know, tonight, that a team that came in 16-5 with the first 5 hitters in the lineup all being in Boston's top 30 prospects, he dominated like  Justin Verlander on his last rehab start before returning to the majors.  In short Cantillo, tonight, looked like a good major league starting pticher.  A really good ML starting pitcher.

ROSTER

You never know what is going on in the heads of Antonnetti, Chernoff and Francona, but right now Brennan, Arias and Gonzalez are not producing.  You likely have to stay with the Brennan/Gonzalez duo as there is no one in the minors ready to help in RF. But they don't have to stick with Arias, who looks like a Mercado/Miller/Zimmer batting hybrid at the moment.  Brayan Rocchio and Tyler Freeman are both raking.  Fry can play 1B.  It is time to give Arias a break.  The easy thing is to send down Arias and bring up Freeman as he likely DOES deserve the next shot.  But more likely Rocchio should get the next shot.  I know it would be demoralizing to Freeman but we are looking for a spark here and all three of Arias, Rocchio and Freeman might be on the roster next year.   So it should be Rocchio for Arias.  Clearly he is better in all aspects of baseball except for shortstop defense.   Time to give Rocchio a chance.  Time to give Fry a good look.  Time for a little tweaking.  As far as pitchers, everyone seems to have their good and bad moments.  No need for changes now except to do the formal thing and make Plesac and Battenfield tandem starters.  Our reinforcements are coming in the form of McKenzie and, hopefully, Civale.  Let's see if we can make it until then.