Agree. With our bullpen and offense, if the starters can get 6+ innings while giving up 3 or less runs, we’ll win some games.

In my dream world Hoch “gets it”, Paulino throws seven innings in under 120 pitches, Sanchez realizes that duplicating ’10 rather than ’11 is worth tens of millions of dollars to him, Duffy decides to throw something nasty in the zone when he has an 0-2 count, and Master Chen is still Master Chen. I’m still good with 85 wins.

“gets rung up for fives runs before any outs are recorded. How does that happen???”

Luke doesn’t pitch well out of the stretch and one of the Boston coaches told Lee Judge that Luke, when he got in trouble, would rare back and try to throw fastballs by big league hitters. That makes them flatten out and go straight, so he’ld get rung up. Second half of the year he used his slider more and got better at containing the damage.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.cgi?id=hochelu01&year=2011&t=p

Good post, Nick.

I don’t want to make a giant deal of this since the Royals aren’t going to sign him anyway, but Edwin Jackson is not “I think he’s a mediocre pitcher asking for a premium salary.”

ERA is flawed, but simplicity he has an under 4 ERA over the last three seasons combined (ERA+ 109). So, he’s about a 10% better than average and that type of performance makes 10 million or less a great bargain. Not to mention the fact that he would immediately become the best pitcher on our roster and it’s not close. I wouldn’t sign him for 4+ years, but to pretend he doesn’t make this years team better is absolutely, unequivocally ridiculous.

The things that puzzled me most about Luke was the outings he had where he would be perfect thru five innings, then gets rung up for fives runs before any outs are recorded. How does that happen???