Three Run Homer

Ah, the Bug League...

Kjerstad is certainly deserving of a callup, but I'm a little surprised they didn't go with a right-handed bat (e.g. Norby).

He has thrown some legitimately nasty pitches tonight. His screwball to strike out Trout with a runner in scoring position in the 3rd inning was epic. Barring injury, I think he's going to stick with the team in some role for the rest of the season.

I would give him through the end of the upcoming homestand to get on track. No big deal to send him down. We've done it with other top prospects and none of them were permanently scarred.

Better than John Means' last start...FWIW.

Halfway there!

He can at least pinch hit once a game for whoever is starting at 2B in place of Holliday. A better way to make playing time for Kjerstad is to trade O'Hearn for pitching. Then call up Norby for Holliday if needed. There are very few O's questions right now to which the right answer does not involve making room for Kjerstad.

I think Holliday has about another week to start making contact more regularly. If they sent him down today, I would call up Kjerstad and find some way of getting him at bats.

This looks like a Buck Showalter Sunday lineup card.

If he really wanted to be pedantic he would have talked about priors, posteriors and Bayes' Law. I credit him for translating Bayesian updating into English.

Why not go to the plate looking to drive an outside fastball the other way?

My takeaway from the discussion about Hays' numbers last year is that he's a very streaky hitter. Right now he's in a slump. He's likely to turn it around.

Can someone remind me whether his current injury is elbow-related (i.e. he hasn't recovered from or has relapsed from TJS) or is it something else? It's sad to think that this might be the end of the line for Means. He was the main bright spot on the team during the dark days and he deserves to be here for the good times.

Why did Hays pinch hit for O'Hearn? Wasn't there a righty on the mound?

He hit another batter in his first appearance with BAL. Now 25 HBP in 132 career IP. I thought this was insanely high. I did some research at BB-Ref and...yeah, it's insanely high. I looked at every pitcher in the top 1000 for career hit batsmen (the cutoff is 34 career HBP). I found only four pitchers with a ratio of HBP to IP higher than 0.1 (i.e. one hit batsman every 10 IP), and three of them pitched mostly or entirely before 1900. They are: Ed Doheny, 141 career hit batsmen in 1405 IP Danny Friend, 60 career hit batsment in 551.2 IP Randy Choate, 45 career hit batsmen in 408 IP Gus Shallix, 39 career hit batsmen in 291 IP Anyway, Yohan Ramirez is off the charts even compared to these pitchers, with a HBP rate approaching 2 every 10 IP. I conjecture that this is the highest ratio of all time for any pitcher above (say) 100 career IP, but would need more research to verify this.