The bad news today wasn’t unexpected, Jaime Garcia is hitting the DL. The good news is that P.J. Walters, uber-sleeper, received the call up from Palm Beach to AA. Walters started the season for the Swing where he went 6-1 with a 6.08 K/BB ratio and a 65% ground ball rate. He was promoted to Palm Beach where he continued his dominance, again putting up a near identical high strikeout rates and low walk rates, while getting ground balls by the truck load. It’ll be interesting to see how he handles AA, or perhaps I should say how AA handles him. So far tonight at least, not so good. We’ll get to that later.
Minor league pitching coordinator Mark Riggins was named the pitching coach of the Mesa Solar Sox of the Arizona Fall League. The season starts Oct. 9th. It’s at least a month away before the rosters are announced, but it’s easy to see Cody Haerther and Jon Jay on the team given all the time they’ve missed to the DL, as they did with Brendan Ryan last year. And don’t worry, we’ll have brief DPR’s of the games the Cardinal prospects are participating in.
Yet again I get the easy load tonight, as the GCL team had the day off and the Palm Beach game was postponed. Johnson City’s game was suspended after 5 innings. I had expected to see Kozma debuting tonight, but he wasn’t in JC’s lineup. Maybe things are just getting finalized, I could see him in a few games for the GCL team. In case you were wondering, Kozma signed for a bonus of $1,395,000, which was right at slot. (Hat tip to fewgoodcards for passing along that info)
Quad Cities played a noon game after the 6 hour marathon last night and got their revenge. Rick Ankiel went yard again. And the Springfield Cardinals pretty much got shut down. Let’s get into it…not in any particular order this time.
- Jared Schweitzer and Jaime Landin were twins today. Both went 3 for 5 with 2 doubles and 3 RBI and a strikeout.
- Steve Hill went 3 for 5 with a double and 2 RBI.
- Arnoldi Cruz went 2 for 5 with a double.
- Clayton Mortensen was knocked around a bit, allowing 3 runs on 7 hits while striking out 3. He only lasted 4 innings.
- Armando Carrasco allowed just a walk over 3 innings, striking out 4.
- Clayton Long was rather wild, walking 5 batters and allowing 4 hits en route to surrendering 4 runs. 2 of those runs were earned. For that matter, the Muckdogs had 4 errors.
- Wayne Daman struck out 4 in 2 innings.
- Andrew Brown went 3 for 4.
- Oliver Marmol had 2 errors.
- Colby went o’fer again. With a strikeout. And a walk. Typical day at the office for him these days. For that matter, Bryan Anderson went 0 for 4 too, but Anderson is still hitting well over .300, Colby is under .250.
- P.J. Walters lasted 5.1 innings, allowing 10 hits and a walk, striking out 2. He also had 2 wild pitches.
- Juan Richardson went 2 for 4.
- Nick Adenhart went 8 innings for the Travelers and gave up just 4 hits.
- Mike Parisi allowed 3 homers and allowed 6 runs and lasted just 3.1 innings. He allowed an unusual amount of fly balls.
- Rick Ankiel hit his 28th homer.
Future Redbirds 
Why did Walters get the call to Springfield over Ottavino? I know Walters has pitched well, but Ottavino seemed like an obvious choice when Garcia went down.
why would ottavino be the obvious choice. the only reason it might be obvious is because he was a 1st rounder. walters has outpitched everyone in the minor league organization since day one from spring training. if you look at his #s in spring training he shouldnt have started in QC anyway.i was at the game tonight & walters gave up 10 hits but all singles & only 2 were hit hard. he just had bad luck. his slider (which is his strikeout pitch) was terrible & he managed to keep his team in the game without his best stuff & the strikezone was very small.guys that have struggled to throw strikes at times (ottavino, norrick, degerman ) are going to have trouble in this league when they dont have there best stuff.
I think it was because garcia’s turn in the rotation matched with walters. they wouldn’t promote ottavino and pitch him on short rest.
grant, the cardinals have said one of the major things they look for when thinking about promoting a guy from high-A to AA is fastball command. i have heard ottavino is still a little lacking in that area, but walters definitely has it. i don’t see how you could really argue against either getting the call.
We’ve finally got BIP data on Cruz. His firstinning.com page had a snafu but that’s been fixed. After looking at it, I still don’t think there’s anything indicative of his talent level. Too much noise given the sample size.
Regarding Cruz’s BIP data, there is the 19% line drive rate across all 3 levels to like. Walk rate is a bit low at 5.1% but that could be because he’s too busy knocking the crap out of the ball to bother taking walks right now. K rate is 12.1% across all 3, which is reasonable, any time a guy has as many XBH’s as K’s that has to be a good sign. Still only 99 plate appearances but the low K rate, high ISO, and high LD% are all encouraging.
Still only 99 plate appearances but the low K rate, high ISO, and high LD% are all encouraging.
They’re encouraging on a knee-jerk reaction level. They tell me nothing about Cruz as a player. ABs below Quad Cities is coming against some dubious talent and you just can’t filter out the noise from this sample size. The data has no predictive value right now.
I remember early in the season, the pitching coach at Springfield, (don’t recall his name at the moment) gave an interview and was asked about Jaime Garcia’s elevated walk rate. He said that Jaime’s mechanics were out of whack, that he was falling off toward 3rd base. That was causing him to elevate the ball more this year and leading to the control problems he was having. I wonder if Garcia hurt his arm due to his mechanical issues this season?
What is the status of J. Garcia injury ????
Garcia went on the DL, but I haven’t seen anything more specific than he was experiencing pain in his elbow.
i’m sure will find out in a bout 3 weeks.
whoops
Ankiel’s homer last night was a rarity — it was to left…not quite down the line, but only about 15-20 feet from the pole. It was a cheap homer — announced distance was only 322 — but it was still encouraging to see him hit an opposite-field homer and draw a walk in the same game.