Game #33: Buchholz vs. Brad Thompson

You'd think if you were in the business of baseball, you would bother to learn the names of all the players.

His BABIP for the outing was .190 where the league average BABIP for the year is over .300.  Buchholz has not had a past of holding hitters far below this line, for tonight, he was pretty lucky.  I'd buy your argument more if this was some time of trend for Taylor, where he's shown competency in the pitch to contact style, ala Cook, but from his last several outings, that hasn't been the case.

For me to truly believe a pitcher is cruising, I want to see K's and groundouts.  I still think to a degree Buchholz is capable of doing this, but it wasn't the case today.

I'm not going to argue this point with you any further, though, and it isn't for animosity's sake.  I'm assuming from your past posts that you have some type of connection with Taylor, evidenced by your unwavering support, and that's fine.  The problem is that it tends to get in the way of open debate.  

So in summation, I'm not saying Buchholz pitched bad, because that's clearly false.  I am saying that he was lucky, and the numbers will support me.  I'm hoping that this is a confidence builder for Buchholz, and that his outing will give him an extended look in the rotation (which puts Fogg on the more immediate hot seat), and with more confidence the strikeouts his stuff is capable of producing will come.  I would like to see more breaking pitches.  He has a good hook that he seems to control better than his fastball, but Yorvit seems to get a little to heater happy in his calls.  With a hard but relatively straight heater, more breaking pitches should keep hitters from digging in on the fastball.

So I don't think the decision for Bautista should be questioned, but whether or not a reliever should have been used in the seventh is the debate.  I think it's a toss up.  The team was not scoring, and if Baker reaches base and starts a rally, Hurdle would have made the right call.  As I stated, Buchholz wasn't necessarily dominating, and he lacks the track record to bank on continued success in the seventh.

Personally, I probably wouldn't have pinch hit for Taylor either, but I don't think this was some gross error in judgment.  This is probably drawing too much attention away from the fact that the only offense was generated on a poorly located sinker.  After Holliday this team was dormant.