The THAT SUCKS Post

No Humans and No More Bad News Please

Things were looking pretty good last night at 7:00 pm.  J and I (and his lady friend) were sitting in a packed theater about to enjoy District 9 and according to his Blackberry the Dodgers were enjoying a semi-comfortable 3-0 lead over the D-Backs.  Everything was as it should be.  Flash forward a few hours and several hundred dead humans and aliens later and all was still well–solid film, nice evening, good times.  Until my dad’s two word text message of THAT SUCKS beeped in.  “OK,” I thought as I walked through the parking lot, “it’s either an injury to one of their better players or they blew the lead.  Either way, it’s no good.”  I dialed him right away and he gave me the Cliff Notes version of this and essentially ruined my night.

It’s pretty clear what’s happening here–the once reliable bullpen, a major strength at the start of the season has been reduced to a steaming pile of dog poop.  After months of repeated work we’ve got guys who flat out don’t have much left in the tank.  Take a look at these splits from Troncoso, Belisario and Broxton broken down by OBP allowed per month:

So either everybody has forgotten how to pitch or we’re dealing with a criminally overworked bullpen.  Some of the blame has got to fall on the likes of Clayton Kershaw and the Schmidt-Weaver-Milton pupu platter and some belongs squarely on the back of Joe Torre who has “his guys” and “his guys” will pitch back to back days until their arms fall off (see: Proctor, Scott).  Bullpen meltdowns are a part of the game and if you’ve got to overwork either a starter or a reliever it’s best to overtax the pen as a general rule but either the team needed to get a top-shelf starter at the deadline who could eat some more innings or they needed to get another arm in the pen besides just Sherrill.

The good news is that the early reports regarding Kuroda are positive and it’s “just” a concussion.  So we’ve got that going for us.