Great photos!!  

 In the absence of a TDIB thread, let me try to initiate today's edition of "Fun With Figures."   First fun fact:  Jose Bautista is on track for full-season totals of 50 home runs and 134 runs batted in.  Not bad for a back-up utility guy.  Remember all those loud moans and groans in March when we realized that Bautista might win a starting job in the outfield this year?

Second fun fact:  three Jays currently have an OPS of 1.000 or greater.  They are:  Shawn Camp; Shaun Marcum; and Edwin Encarnacion.   Which of those 3 names is the most surprising??

(As someone who was never impressed by EE in the past, I would happily eat crow and admit I was totally wrong if he's able to maintain even a pale shadow of this performance over the rest of this season.) 

The vast majority have regarded Gonzalez, Bautista, Encarnacion and Buck as placeholders until some of the prospects are ready.  At some point it may make sense to change that view on one or more of these guys.  I noticed on the TV broadcast this weekend, they mentioned talking with somebody, D. Murphy I think, about Buck, and he said that Buck is a natural pull hitter and KC was getting him to go the opposite way.  The Jays broke him of that pattern and now he is back to what he does best, and they think he might be a 25-30 HR player.  I've always liked Encarnacion's bat and now he has 6 HR's in 6 games off the DL.  Gonzalez fields well and looks like he may hit 20-25 HR's.  I've been slow to change my mind on Bautista, but he's been doing this since late last August and maybe he really has developed his power at this stage of his career.  We're almost 2 months into the season.  At some point, maybe one (or a few) or these guys should be considered as possible longer term options.

• Gonzalez was a placeholder while we waited for a franchise shortstop to be found
• Buck and Molina were black holes in the bottom of the batting lineup, again while we waited for a franchise catcher to show up
  
• Wells was on a downhill slide that made his contract an increasing embarrassment
• Encarnacion was a maybe slugger/mediocre fielder combo at 3B, who had last showed his true promise several seasons back
• Snider was a big question mark, who had nothing more to prove at AAA, and a great future ahead of him, but would he start to click anytime this year?
• Bautista was at best a better than average utility guy, but also being slotted into a lead-off role, for which he was the least inappropriate candidate
  
• Hill and Lind were the only true power hitters we could count on, although because their production was deemed likely to fall off from last year, our home run output  would follow suit
  

• A cast-off SF OF who would fill the lead-off spot brilliantly?
• Wells, Gonzalez, Buck and especially Bautista among the league leaders in slugging at their positions?
• Hill and Lind trailing the home run hitting of all four of them?
• Encarnacion hitting six home runs in his first 50 at bats (following a stint on the DL)?
• A major league-crushing lead in homers and doubles, while struggling to get their share of singles?
• A real dilemma in trying to find room for three sluggers at two positions when Bautista, Encarnacion, and Snider are all healthy?
  
• Three out of four minor league teams fully able to compete with the best in their league?
• Several genuine catching prospects, all at once [Arencibia, Jerolman, Jiminez, d'Arnaud, Gomes...]?
• More than 15 genuine additional prospects down in the mid-high minors all at once [Wallace, Thames, Calderone, Mastroianni, Loewen, Emaus, Drabek, Stewart, Magnuson, Alvarez, Huggins, Pastornicky, Hechavarria, Farina, Galley, McDade, Ramirez...all without tapping the highly competitive Lugnuts]?

Tampa leads the majors with 32 wins.  Next are 10 teams with 25 or 26 wins.

Well I thought it was a bit quirky.

180, 177, 168, 138, 128 - These are the ERA+'s of Tampa's starting five, through 44 combined starts.  Romero and Marcum would slot in as the #4 and #5 pitchers on this all star staff.

Marcum-Romero-Cecil are pitching every bit as well as Garza-Shields-Price, if not better, once you get past ERA+ and look at things like FIP.

Wells and Gonzalez have already started the regression back to their career levels, with average Mays. Giving Snider 5 starts a week from the "bench" sounds like a nice idea, but has Clarence ever shown himself to be amenable to such a thing? It sure hasn't appeared so far that he's willing to rest a starter that often. We all wondered what would happen when Encarnacion got back, and as usual, it worked itself out on its own. I'll wait till Snider is ready to be activated from a wonky wrist, which people around here seem to think can take years to heal, before worrying about the roster crunch.

Tremendous start by Cecil, but I was astounded that Downs was brought into a 6-0 game for the 4th time in 6 games. Purcey & Roenicke are fresh.

I think WillRain was trying to suggest that Bautista (not Snider) should be the super-sub who plays 5 or 6 days a week.  (Snider is obviously not the type who can play everywhere except SS and C....  But you've gotta proof-read, WillRain, or people will think you're describing Snider as a super-sub!) 

Bautista will probably move around the lineup when Snider comes back, but I'm pretty sure he's going to be playing almost every day, as he has so far.  The way he is playing now, it will be very hard to bench the guy for more than a game every 2 or 3 weeks.  In fact he's played every game of the year so far.  So, where to slot him?  It would make sense to give an occasional day off to Snider and Encarnacion, since they've recently been injured, so Bautista will get some games that way.  He could get some days at 1B if Overbay doesn't improve dramatically.  He could get a day or two at DH and LF to rest the workhorses there, or to allow Lewis to slide into CF for a game or two.  But it's still a dilemma -- someone's going to have to ride the bench for more than one game a week when Snider returns. 

Most likely scenario:  someone picks up a minor injury, as inevitably happens as the season drags on, and we don't have to worry about any of these questions.

On the question about Scott Downs:  I have a hunch that Gaston might be prepping him for a possible role as closer.  There are growing concerns that Gregg can't handle the closer role every day.  He's gotten too tired, too soon.  He even struggled mightily in his single inning in the 12-4 laugher against Arizona on Sunday.   We might be seeing the "closer-by-committee" situation again, where Downs and even Frasor share the job sometimes with Gregg.   Or the job could go primarily to Downs.  In that scenario, Downs needs to get lots of work, to prep for a near-daily role, which might explain why he was given an inning against the Angels last night.

Marcum-Romero-Cecil are pitching every bit as well as Garza-Shields-Price, if not better, once you get past ERA+ and look at things like FIP.

Yes, I wasn't trying to get into a comparison of our pitching staffs (staves?).  I was just noting Tampa's ERAs for mere shock value. 

Thing is about sitting Bautista is that he has flat out been our BEST hitter ever since he became a full time starter. Our best hitter. Bar none.

Moving him into the cleanup spot might be more reasonable than moving him to the bench.

Really, it seems pretty obvious that Overbay has to be the one who sits. Make Bautista the 1B and #5 hitter.

Snider is obviously not the type who can play everywhere except SS and C....

But he COULD be used to spell all 7 positions, which is what I assumed Will meant. It would just involve moving Bautista all over the field, not Snider.

Come on, WillRain, you can't try to justify a wrong prediction by claiming that Gonzalez was "lucky" or "flukey" to get a bunch of home runs.   That's not serious analysis in any way -- that's New Age spiritualism.  He hit a bunch of timely homers, the Jays won some ball games -- deal with it.  Or should we remove those wins from the official standings too? 

If you're going to remove 10 homers from Gonzalez's season totals to justify your prediction, why not add them to Overbay's totals and claim that Overbay was just "unlucky" and should have had 10 extra homers?  Then suddenly you could argue that Overbay is as good as ever!  Anyone can "prove" any point at all if you're arbitrarily removing homers from one guy and claiming he was "lucky."   If you're going to delete the best week of Gonzalez's season, along with another good game from later in the season, you're just selectively manipulating statistics to make an absurd point.  That way lies madness.

Now, if you want to predict that Gonzalez is playing over his head and will soon regress to the mean -- fine, make the prediction, and we'll see at the end of the season whether you're right or wrong.  But please don't delete statistics like a magician to "prove" your prediction.

WillRain, you're still not making much sense.  You seem to be saying that it's a valuable analytical tool to remove a batch of home runs from Gonzalez's totals, remove a bunch of his good games, and make conclusions based on his mediocre games, his outs and his singles.  How is that helpful?  Any player's season is built on good games as well as bad games.  It's absurd to remove a few of the good games and call them "luck."  If Gonzalez (or anyone else) has a great game, that's not an outlier that should be removed from his totals -- that's how a player builds his statistics.

If you could show that Gonzalez began the season on a hot streak and then steadily deteriorated and played badly over a long period of time, this might be useful data.  But it's obviously not true.  Over the past 10 games, he is batting .324, which is again above your expected numbers for him.  He's been up and down all season, like most players, but there's no evidence that his good games were just a few isolated games at the start of the season.

You're basically proposing that we should delete one of Gonzalez's best-performing games from late April -- along with the entire first week of the season -- and evaluate his record without those good games.  How is this helpful?  Every player in the league has exceptionally good games -- that's baseball. An exceptional performance is not "luck" -- it's something that counterbalances the bad games.  You have to add up the good games and bad games and weigh everything.  You can't remove their exceptional games purely on the basis that they are exceptional. 

People say "Carlson sucked in 2009" - Really, he didn't remotely. He sucked VERY badly in two isolated stretch of games which skewed his totals. Out side those stretches, for 80, 90% of his season, he was almost as good as he was in 2008.  That, IMO, is a valuable bit of information. it stands opposed to his having been a guy who never went more than a couple of appearances without giving up a run and was thus unreliable as a close-game reliever.

In fact, the Carlson example is a perfect illustration of my point, not your point.   By deleting the "isolated bad stretches" from Carlson's totals last year, you managed to convince yourself that Carlson was still as good as he was in his excellent 2008 season.  Your mistaken conclusion:  Carlson is still a good pitcher.  In reality, as 2010 shows, Carlson has deteriorated badly since 2008.   His numbers this year -- at the AAA level, not the majors -- are pretty miserable:  an ERA of 6.10, with the opposition hitting .340 against him.  Yes, he was demoted for injury rehab at the start of 2010, but are you going to blame the injury for everything in 2010?  Other pitchers have recovered a lot faster than him.  (And if he truly was injured, he wouldn't be playing.)  It's much more likely that there's a trend in his performance since 2008, and not a good trend.  So, keep manipulating statistics if you want -- delete the good stretches or the bad stretches, dismiss some games as "luck" and cherry-pick the results that you want to believe -- but it doesn't necessarily give you any insight into the truth about a player.

WillRain, your arguments keep shifting around.  You keep choosing different periods of the 2010 season and shifting your focus all the time, so it's hard for me to keep track of your argument.  But let me try to summarize the main points of your several lengthy posts about Alex Gonzalez and his 2010 season:  1) we shouldn't consider his first week of the season;  2) we shouldn't consider his first 10 games;  3) we shouldn't consider his last 10 games;  4) we shouldn't consider his game on April 30;  5) we should only consider the 39 games that you have specifically chosen because you think they fit your theory.  Well, actually, make that 36 games.

I happen to disagree with the idea of cherry-picking a stretch of games to fit your theory, while ignoring all the games that contradict your theory, but -- just for the sake of argument -- let's look at those 36 games.  Even in those 36 games, Gonzalez's OPS and SLG are significantly above his career average -- at an age when he should be declining, not improving.

You obviously feel that the first 10 games were "aberrational" and the next 36 games should be viewed in isolation from the 10 games before it.  But if take any player in baseball, find the "aberrational" games, and remove them from his season totals, obviously his numbers will be grossly reduced.  What does it prove?  It proves that every player in baseball has good stretches and bad stretches.  If you remove the good stretches, hey, wow -- his numbers are lower!   Suddenly, any all-star is looking very ordinary.  In fact, the whole league would look average, because that's what happens when you remove the "aberrations" -- you're left with a bunch of very average and boring players.  And you don't prove anything at all.

In fact, here's something you might enjoy:  take the top 10 hitters in the AL, find the "aberrational" games where they hit better than average, and remove those games from their season totals.  Then, remark on the fact that all of them look worse!

I'll be over here, finding a better use for my time.