It has been a strange season for the Toronto Blue Jays. They have been hovering around the 500 mark for much of the season despite losing a lot of key players to injuries and despite some notable poor performances. The list of the bad things that have happened to the team is lengthy:
1. Brandon Morrow, Kyle Drabek, Sergio Santos, Drew Hutchison, Jesse Litsch, Dustin McGowan and Luis Perez are all on the 60 day disabled list.
2. More recently Jose Bautista, Adam Lind and JP Arencibia are on the 15 day DL.
You can make a decent argument that Clifton Phifer Lee is the best starting pitcher in baseball. Granted, thanks to the intidimidating presence of future first ballot Hall-of-Famer Roy Halladay, it might be easier to argue he's not even the best starting pitcher in his own team's rotation. (And thanks to the continuing emergence of Cole Hamels. may even earn a bronze in the City of Brotherly Shove). But the case can be made for the lithe lefty.
Still, look at his performance last night against the Dodgers -- 7.2 IP, six hits, two runs, one walk, 12 strikeout, seven shoutout frames to begin the game. What's that, it must be his seventh or eighth win of the year already? Um, not quite ...
That headline courtesy of Bauxite BlueJayWay from the Advance Scout thread. The Jays are once again being accused of stealing signs. That assertion was strongly suggested by Baltimore starter and losing pitcher Jason Hammel in the wake of Wednesday's 4-1 victory by Toronto at the Dome.
Nobody has noticed -- again, perhpas because it's not worth noticing? -- that four of the five pitchers in the '12 Yankee starting rotation have last/family names that end in vowels -- Sabathia, Kuroda, Nova and Garcia. (Thanks a lot, Phil Hughes.) And that doesn't even count recent off-season acquisition Joel Pineda (yet!) ...
When you also consider the Bronxpen is anchored by a guy named Rivera and includes stalwarts named Rapada and Soriano (but we're not counting the silent-lettered Cory Wade here), there could be an awful lot of Yankee games pitched entirely by pitchers with Italian/Latin/Far Eastern vowel-ending names. And when Pineda returns from injury, if he bumps Hughes back to the 'pen (though he seems more likely to bump Garcia), the Yankees could get upwards of 140 starts from the ends-with-a-vowel Name Club For Men. Would this be a record?
I have no idea. Do you?
The following wholly unscientific observational data is pulled from BaseballReference.com's list of the Top 200 winningest pichers of all time, From Cy Young's 511 at #1 down to Sandy Koufax's T200 total of 165 ...
