Quick Hits from Spring Training

It's still February, but baseball is in the air, and Spring Training games are just days away. Here are a few tid bits I recently came across...

• Brett Cecil will start the first Grapefruit League game for the Blue Jays when he takes the mound against the Yankees this Wednesday.


• While I don't generally like to give much credit to Spring Training prospect hype, Oakland A's manager Bob Geren took time out of a Sunday meeting with reporters to make a few comments about first baseman Chris Carter.  "Chris Carter hits the ball about as far as I've ever seen.  Are you kidding me?"  Pretty high praise for a 21 year old.
• Though not completely forgotten, Indians pitcher Aaron Laffey has a lot of ground to gain this spring.  He finished the 2008 season rehabbing an inflamed elbow that had plagued him since June, and all reports indicate that he is in good shape and ready to compete for a starting job in Cleveland. 
• What happened to this guy?  Andy Marte was recently placed on waivers by the Cleveland Indians, just 3 years after he was considered one of the elite prospects in the country.  Marte never lived up to the hype, and has yet to reach even basic production levels in the majors.  Maybe it was another case of great expectations gone sour, or perhaps another casualty of the steroid era, but either way, Marte has been one of the biggest busts of the past decade.
• After spending big bucks and an early first round draft pick on shorstop Gordon Beckham, the White Sox are now considering utilizing him in the outfield due to an overcrowded young infield.  I don't believe they'll ever actually do it, and if it did happen I would really question the sanity of the White Sox front office, but the fact that the idea has even surfaced seems absurd to me.  Shortstops with above average defense and .300/20 home run potential can be quite a valuable asset.  Left fielders with those types of stats?  Not so much.

That's about it for now.  I can't wait for games to start, even if they don't really mean anything.  The country needs some baseball in its blood. 

Aaron Laffey Sent to AAA

The move was actually made a few days ago to make room for the return of Fausto Carmona. I'm not so sure it was the right move, but it won't hurt Laffey, and the Indians need to prepare for the future more than they need to win games. Anyways, here are some of Laffey's stats over the 4 months he spent with Cleveland.


He looked pretty good when he first came up, but he let his walk rate sneak up on him, perhaps due to trying too hard to keep pitches out of the zone. It's hard to tell from the chart, but his walk rate actually equaled his strike out rate in June and July, which is obviously not a good thing.

Aside from pitch location, I also wondered if he was struggling with mechanics or ground ball rate regression. Here's his ground ball chart.


His ground ball rates looked fine, so I don't think there's too much he needs to work on other than slight location adjustments. He might have suffered from slight mechanical issues, but once again I think he might have tried to overcompensate at times, leading to poor mechanics and location (which resulted in a higher WHIP and ERA, which led to more overcompensation). It's kind of like when you start to doze off while driving, and then you hit those bumpy strips on the side of the road that make that weird whirring noise. It snaps you back to reality and you jerk the wheel back towards the middle of the road, but then you swerve into on-coming traffic and your life flashes before your eyes before you're able to cut back into your own lane. Maybe the Indians saw Laffey slipping into that cycle and decided a stint in the minors would save him from being crushed by on-coming 18 wheelers being driven by 230 lbs. corner infielders.

I don't have any video's to break down comparing Laffey in April to Laffey in July, but none of his stats were on a positive trend line, and he obviously needed to take some time to refine his approach. He'll get it figured out, and might be back before the season is over. Either way, I think he'll be much better in 2009, and should be a very good starter in 18-24 months.