With the hangover from the Superbowl slowly clearing (both fan-wise and whiskey-not-so-wise), my attention now shifts solely to the baseball season. I will certainly tune in to watch the Canucks win the Stanley Cup (sorry leafs fans, maybe your kids will witness a winning team), but my excitement lies in the provocatively close beginning of the 2011 Show.
Let's talk starters.
The 2011 Blue Jays will be a young team, and nowhere will this be more emphasized than in the starting rotation. At a combined 124 years of age, for an average of 24.8 years old, the Blue Jays will boast the youngest staff of starters in all of baseball (assuming my predictions will come true. They will.). Here's how I believe the rotation will wind up once the competitions in spring training have concluded.
1- Ricky Romero
2- Brandon Morrow
3- Brett Cecil
4- Kyle Drabek
5- Marc Rzepczynski - Don't misspell his name.... it's Marc with a C.
The first 4 spots are all but set in stone, while the 5th spot has a huge array of competitors. Let's break it down.
Ricky Romero will be the leader of the bunch at all of 26 years old and with just 2 years of MLB service. He has the fighter type mentally you want from your ace out there on the hill. Some guys will get tagged for a few runs early, figure they don't have it that day and start wondering what's for dinner. You need your ace to be a bulldog whether it is 1-0 or you are down 0-4, and I believe Ricky has that ability. He needs to show a little more command of his hard sinker this year if he wants to be the truly dominant pitcher he has shown flashes of. Last year, his curveball became his out pitch because batters stopped offering at his devastating change-up. While this did wonders for the consistency of his breaking ball, he needs to address what was happening with his best pitch, the change-up. In my opinion, he must have been tipping the pitch to batters somehow. If he can get that weapon back to it's full potency, he will have no trouble transitioning into a genuine ace.
Morrow, at 26 and with 4 years experience becomes the wily vet. His 2010 began with enough up and downs to make my mom motion sick, but the last stretch of his season, before being shut down on an innings limit, showed what everyone in Seattle and now Toronto had been waiting for. Capped off by his 17 K, 1 h performance against a tough Tampa lineup, Morrow proved that he could be an upper echelon starter in this league for a long time to come. He is the one guy in the rotation able to miss his spots and get away with it due to overpowering stuff. He just needs to stay healthy. Great trade for the Jays.
Brett Cecil lead the team in wins last year with 15. A slightly less flashy, slightly more economical version of Ricky Romero, I see no reason for him not to continue his success. He fits very well in the 3rd spot. Plus the goggles are dead sexy.
While it will be said (by people who are required to say such things) that Kyle Drabek will be competing for a position on the team just like everybody else (blah blah blaaah), that simply isn't the case. Fans are still anxious to find out exactly what we got for our beloved Doctor Halladay, and the face of that trade is now Kyle Drabek. This is the year we will get a full glimpse of the young chucker with the famous dad. No pressure. Unless he literally takes his pants down in spring training and poops on the mound, he is going to have a spot in the starting 5, whether it be as the 4th, or, I believe more strategically, as the 5th starter (more on that strategy later). Drabek features a plus fastball and a very good curveball which will be his bread and butter.
Which leaves one spot up for grabs.
There will be no shortage of competition for this remaining starting gig. The contestants include:
Jesse Litsch. I am sorry, but I just don't ever want to see you on that mound; something opposing batters would never say. Every time he gets out of an inning, I stop holding my breath. Just grab the bats.
Zach Stewart. A very interesting candidate who arguably out-pitched Drabek last year in AAA. This is one of our arms of the future, and we could see him before the year is done, but I see him starting the year in AAA to work on a 3rd pitch to compliment an excellent fastball and slider. That is, if the Jays continue to develop him as a starter. A dark horse.
Scott Richmond. This guy has a great back-story and is impossible not to root for. Aside from that, he also has some pretty nasty stuff including a great 12-6 curve and a hard biting slider which, unfortunately, lacks consistency. And that is the key to why he will miss out on the 5th spot; consistency. He has the ability to go out there and shut a team down for 7 innings and rack up some K's, but he also has the ability to get hit all over the park. The runner up.
And , the victor, Marc Rzepczyinski. I didn't even log on to the Jays website to check the spelling this time. The worst and best thing that Marc has going for him is that he is starkly similar to Romero and Cecil. He throws a few more breaking balls, featuring a slider as well as a curveball. This is a man who lives on the groundball, with all of his pitches having sharp downward movement. He also gave up very few homeruns in minor ball, something that hasn't translated to the bigs for him yet, but should. He will be the steady 5th starter the team is looking for and should round out a strong young rotation that can grow together.
(Note: I have only discussed the few players I believe have an actual chance of winning the job. Several other barfy options such as Jo-Jo Reyes ad Carlos Villanueva will be considered to be in the running as well. In the running like the jamaican bob-sled team...... Cool Runnings. Those guys never had a chance, mon.)
The strategy that I said I would come back to pertains to something the Jays sorely lacked in 2010; VARIETY. Marcum, sinker pitcher, out pitch: change. Romero, sinker pitcher, out pitch: change. Tallet, Cecil, Dana Eveland, pretty much everyone we threw out there last year except Morrow was the same, and even mostly lefties. A team could face us in a 4 game series and literally see 4 pitchers with the exact same approach.
Baseball is a game of timing, and you can imagine how a day after facing Tim Wakefield knuckleballs for 4 at bats, its going to be hard to catch up to a Josh Beckett fastball. Well, conversely, if you faced a lefty throwing 90 and trying to get you out with a changeup yesterday, it can only get easier seeing the same thing today.
The Blue Jays had very little variety to their rotation last year- something that I feel negatively affected Ricky Romero as he ended up slotting into the 3rd spot in the rotation due to timing of starts at the beginning of the year. He consistently had a copy cat chuck going the day before (Tallet, Cecil) and a mirror image (Marcum) the game prior to that. I would love to see how he fairs with teams facing the hard throwing young righty Drabek the day before. They should offer more different looks this year with Morrow and Drabek splitting up the lefties and Rzep being more about the breaking ball than the change. They just have to decide if they want to have Cecil and Rzep back to back (Drabek as the 5th starter) or Rzep and Romero (Drabek as the 4th starter).
As I said, this group projects to be the youngest in baseball, and no doubt, there will be growing pains. If Rzep, and to a lesser degree Drabek, doesn't fair well out of the gates, he has a myriad of replacements waiting in the wings, including all the guys listed above and Dustin MacGowan (remember him?), should he ever find himself healthy.
All in all, I find this an exciting time for Blue Jays pitchers. We have no over paid stop gap options preventing our young'uns from developing. To compete in this wildly unfair division, we have to adopt an approach akin to what the Rays have done, and that means sticking with our young talent and hoping allllllllll those scouts were right. With any luck, our pitching staff and young position players should reach their peaks at around the same time and give us a ball club that can compete for years to come.
Agree? Disagree? Care to quote odds on Kyle Drabek placing his stool on the Dunedin rubber? Join the blog and post your comment below.
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