Bad News, Good News
By
KC2HMZ
Posted at 3:55 pm
We're even scooping the official site on this one, not a peep on there about these moves yet as of the time of this post!
First, the bad news:
* Ryan Freel has been placed on the 15-day DL.
* Jon Coutlangus has been optioned to Louisville.
* Gary Majewski has been recalled from Louisville.
Now, the good news:
* Eddie Guardado has been activated from the DL.
That's 13 pitchers and only three OFs on the 25-man. That's just way too close for comfort to seeing Conine in the OF.
Good to see Eddie back, too, but as for the rest, this is the big bullpen shakeup Pete McCanWin hinted at the other night?
Cooter: 3.93 ERA, 118 ERA+, 36-2/3 IP, 31 H, 15 ER, 3 HR
Coffey: 6.04 ERA, 77 ERA+, 44-2/3 IP, 61 H, 30 ER, 11 HR
Coffey stays in the bigs and Coutlangus goes to AAA?
Utterly ridiculous.
And as if that isn't enough, Majewski is back. gasoline Latte to go along with Gasoline-Frappucino. Well, tonight and tomorrow are $1 hotdog nights at GABP. I guess the Reds figure that if Coffey and Majewski give up 28 runs in the seventh inning, nobody will care because everyone will be in the hotdog lines instead of watching the game.
HMZ
Keppinger can play OF. He played it regularly in Louisville this year.
Kind of a bummer that Coutlangus gets sent down, but it’s not like the Reds’ season is at stake. I suspect it’s just because they don’t want too many lefties in the pen. And Gosling and Santos are long men, which might be needed, the way things have been going.
HMZ, you’re too much.
To be fair, Cooter really *wasn’t* fitting in with the rest of the bullpen. No need to cause ERA envy at this point.
Just heard some more bad news. Ryan Freel will have surgery Wednesday to fix damaged cartilage in his right knee. Could be (and my guess is that he probably will be) through for the year.
😥
Out for the year just to have his knee scoped? Isn’t that, like, a 2-week recovery time?
He’s not just having his knee scoped (debridement). He’s having a tear repaired. They said they’d know after the surgery how long he’d have to be out.
Recovery from debridement can be very quick, but if it’s a more complicated repair, he might not be able to walk for weeks.
And there’s not much of the season left, at this point.
it was year ending 😥
The heart of the team is gone till 2008.
I know he has struggled but I expect him to be back at normal
freel numbers next year.
The knee will be healed
and the head injury will be farther in the past.
get well soon freel.
By the way. note hammilton is close to returming.
also look at this.
2003 hamstring injurys manajers changed boone to Milly
2004 no dl stay !st place for about a month during first hafe broken bone in hand at end of year used as pinch runner
2005 toe , knee and quad injuries manargers change milly to Narron
2006 no dl till broken hand bone at end of year. 3 games from play offs
2007 head injurys, and knee managers change narron to McCann
at this rate he will have a good year but will sustan a hand injury at the end and 08 the team will do well
and in 09 the year will hond more injurys for ryan and a new manager as well. 🙁
the question is how do you keep Freel and Hobs in the linup health at
the same time?
Welcome, Hamk. Pleasure to have you.
Aw, man. I’ll miss Freel for the rest of the season. Especially if they keep this winning up and find themselves in a couple weeks needing the kind of boost Freel provides.
Oh well. Good things coming for 2008, right? 🙂
Here’s the latest news that the Reds haven’t bothered to post a press release on their web site about yet:
[i]Wayne Krivsky descends into the vast wastelands of the baseball scrap heap, rummages around for an undetermined amount of time, and emerges with…[/i]
TRANSACTIONS 8/8/07 – Claimed OF Jason Ellison off waivers from the Seattle Mariners; Optioned RHP Todd Coffey to Triple-A Louisville.
Baseball’s ace bargain-basement shopper does it again. Not only does he make a move to improve the bullpen (textbook example of addition by subtraction), he comes up with a useful player to rescue Reds fans from the agony of having to watch Jeff Conine try to play in the outfield.
Ellison was out of options in Seattle and the Mariners DFA’ed him a week ago when they called up hot prospect Adam Jones from Tacoma. Seattle had hoped to keep him in the organization and bring him back as a September callup, but instead, he’s now on the Reds’ 25-man roster.
However, that status may prove to be short-lived when Josh Hamilton is ready to come off the DL. That’s too bad, because otherwise, Ellison would seem to have some of the qualifications to be an RHM favorite, he’s a short, speedy guy. Throws and bats righthanded and has played all three outfield positions in the majors. You can check out his stats [url=http://www.baseball-reference.com/e/ellisja01.shtml]here.[/url] The quotes from Kriv-Dawg and Pete McCanWin paint him as a high-energy guy who can play anywhere in the outfield and can run some.
Ellison was the starting CF in San Francisco in 2005 until the team traded for Randy Winn at the deadline, and before that he was notorious for being the Giants’ designated pinch-runner for Baroid. They subsequently traded him to Seattle for minor league pitcher Travis Blackley.
One of the Mariners’ blogs said that Ellison was well-liked in the clubhouse, and noted [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Ellison]his role in the bench-clearing incident involving the Mariners and A’s in Oakland earlier this season.[/url]
So in one fell swoop, Krivsky lands a guy who might turn out to be a useful addition to the bench, and gets rid of the pitcher who led the team in being an object of fan derision by shipping him to the Louisvuille Bats, where Rick Sweet and Ted Power will inherit from McCanWin and Dick Pole the unenviable task of watching Coffey throw gasoline on opposing teams’ bonfires. Bravo!
HMZ
I hope RHM. I am gussing you are one of the few blogers who has not turned your back on the little guy with onr ruff year.
and realy he had his normal year untill the concussion
historicly his bat comes alive in june but he was hurt.
I am calling this a fluk year for him do to that nomater what other say on other sites. But i am glad you appear to be smarter. thanks for having your site. it is very refreshing. 🙂
A lot of other blogs say what they say because many of the people posting there are heavily into sabermetrics and can’t bring themselves to think that what they see in those numbers might possibly be wrong.
The recent articles about Dunn are a good case in point. They seem to make a good case for arguing that the Reds can’t afford to lose Dunn’s offense – but even if they had three Adam Dunns in the outfield, they still wouldn’t be able to win because their pitching is so ghastly that too often, Dunn hitting a homer just means the Reds lose by four runs instead of five.
If this was already a championship team, Dunn would be an untouchable, but can the Reds throw a sixth of their payroll at a DH in a league that doesn’t use a DH when they don’t half the pitching they need to contend? I don’t think so. I’ve been watching baseball for more than forty years. I trust my eyes and my instincts. The statheads would say that my eyes and instincts are wrong, but I think statheads tend to put the cart before the horse by putting too much emphasis on the importance of offense and not enough on the importance of pitching and defense.
The formula for building a winner in baseball is the same now as it has been for 130 years, for the good and sufficient reason that it works. It begins with pitching and defense. For anyone who simply must have [i]numbers[/i] to prove what their [i]eyes[/i] should be telling them to begin with, this team gives up [i]way[/i] too many runs. The Reds are 15th in the NL in runs allowed and, not coincidentally, 14th in winning percentage. If they don’t fix the pitching, it doesn’t matter what kind of numbers Dunn puts up, they’re going to be a losing team.
As for Freel, I don’t know what RHM’s opinions are on what the Reds need to do to turn the current disaster into a genuine contender, and I wouldn’t presume to speak for her. But I’m sure she’s got [i]more[/i] than enough smarts to watch games and see that every time Freel plays, he’s out there busting his tail trying to do anything he can do to try and help the team win, he’s a high-energy, sparkplug type of player on a team that could use a few more guys with attitudes like his…no matter what the saber guys think of his ratio of steals to caught stealings.
HMZ
You sound like Paul Daugherty, HMZ, and your argument falls apart in the same place. It doesn’t matter how much the Reds are spending on Dunn because his salary isn’t standing in the way of them bringing in decent pitching. The Reds have loads of money, esp now that Milton is out of the picture. Until they learn how to evaluate pitching talent and convince said talent to play in the ‘Nati, the best shot they have is to homer it up and hope for the best.