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Baseball Notes 3/29/06

Marlin Arms
Dealing from a position of strength the Florida Marlins traded two minor league pitchers for major league reliever Todd Wellemeyer in an effort to shore up a very shaky looking bullpen. General Manager Larry Beinfest pulled in tons of young pitchers during the Marlin’s off-season veteran purge and that allowed him to take a chance on Wellemeyer. The Marlins are banking on more consistent work allowing
Wellemeyer to improve his walks to innings pitched ratio. The twenty-seven year old does have the potential to succeed as evidenced by 92 career strikeouts in 84 1/3 innings pitched.

A Good National Injury?
It’s never a good thing to lose your starting shortstop to injury especially if you’ve committed millions of dollars to him over the life of a four year contract. Or is it? In Washington the loss of starting shortstop Christian Guzman for the first couple weeks of the season may not be a bad thing. As a full-time player over the past three seasons Guzman has been atrocious at the plate. In those three years he has not broken above a .275 batting average, a .315 on-base percentage or a .385 slugging percentage. Last year was his worst offensive effort yet -- .219/.260/.314. It’s easily one of the worst offensive seasons in baseball history. Guzman’s replacement will be veteran Royce Clayton who’s also an anemic hitter. Yet his 2005 .270/.320/.351 stat line is light years ahead of Guzman’s.

Rocky Road
It’s has to be tough being J.D. Closser this morning. The twenty-six year old catcher spent all of 2005 on the big league club playing in 92 games and performing adequately at the plate and in the field. This spring, though, he got off on the wrong foot behind the plate when he failed to throw out the first seventeen runners that ran on him. A .297 spring batting average wasn’t enough to keep him on the big league club and he’ll be sent down to Triple-A to work on his defense. In his stead Todd Greene and Danny Ardoin will man the catcher position in Colorado.

Cub Hopes
In recent memory have there been two pitchers on the same team with so much potential that have suffered injury setbacks as much as Mark Prior and Kerry Wood of the Cubs have the past three years? The Cubs have placed both pitchers on the fifteen day disabled list to start the season. Prior due to a strained muscle in his shoulder and Wood due to his continued recovery from knee surgery. If it weren’t for Carlos Zambrano eating up and producing quality innings year after year the Cubs probably would’ve been consistent second division contenders in the NL Central the last couple of years instead of being near the top of the division.

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