Last week Minor Leaguer started a new feature called Thursday's Three Things (if you could read that out loud, mimicking Daffy Duck's voice, I'd appreciate it). This week, ML passed it off to me, with the rather flimsy excuse that he wanted to sleep tonight. Doesn't he know, bloggers never sleep? Or is that cheaters never perspire? Oh, I got it, bloggers never get paid (though what that has to do with the subject at hand, I'll never know). Hmmm maybe it was me that should have slept.
Without further ado, here are this week's Thursday's Three Things:
Thing 1: Ryan Goins (that's it, just Ryan Goins)
Six games into Ryan Goins' MLB career, Ryan is hitting .455/.478/.545, with 5 runs scored. Now he isn't going to hit like this forever, but he's been a lot of fun to watch, and that's a rare thing this season. He really looks like a pro out there, but then it is easy to look good when you are hitting .455.
Beyond the batting average, his defense at second base is far better than anything we've seen at the position this season. Our starting pitching has been awful, but how much of it is due to the awful defense we've been playing. The middle infield has been a large part of why the defense has been so bad (as well as Melky in left field, JP behind the plate and everyone that played third while Brett was hurt). One of the things I'm hoping the Jays do for next year is find an excellent defensive 2B. I don't care if he hits or not (it isn't like Maicer Izturis was channeling his inner Cano). It is starting to look to me like Goins might be that guy that can play excellent defense at second.
One of my favorite baseball truisms is never judge a guy on a hot streak. Goins isn't as good with the bat as he's looked (no kidding Tom, how many .455 hitters do you know). Sooner or later, the hot streak will end and then we'll be able to put together a more realistic view of Goins as a player.
Anyway, let's have a little contest. The contest is: Pick the date of the game and the inning that Ryan Goins' batting average first drops under .400. I don't have a prize for the winner, but I'll figure something.
Thing 2: JP brings in two runs on a strikeout.
One of the great things about baseball is the chance to see something you've never seen before. I'm sure that I've never seen 2 runs score on a strikeout before, and if someone told me I was going to see something like that, I'd have bet that it would be the Jays screwing up badly enough for that to happen. Of course, if the Jays allowed those runs, Morosi would be telling us that we have no winning baseball instincts.
One of the several funny things about this is that JP took a fastball right down the middle of the strike zone for strike three. Shouldn't you be ready to, at least, foul anything off that's over the plate. But, had the pitch been 2 feet off the plate, you know he would have swung. Of course, that catcher Chris Stewart couldn't catch the ball, down the center of the strike zone, is also pretty funny, especially after listening to Buck tell us what a great defensive catcher the Yankees have in Stewart.
You know, with the number of times JP strikes out, I guess it was only a matter of time until this happened. If an infinite number of monkeys can write Shakespeare (or one can write a blog post), then an infinite number of JP strikes should, sooner or later, produce this:
Thing 3: Brandon Phillips gently airs his complaints with a reporter
So, this isn't safe for work or our site, but Brandon Phillips has the same problems with reporters that J.P. Arencibia does, but JP uses less Mother ******** when he complains about it. Phillips was unhappy that a reporter talked about his OBP and was too negative (we've heard all this before). I should apologize to JP, as it appears he could have handled he problems with the press in a far worse way.
I understand players being upset with reporters or bloggers, or random fans shouting things. It is really hard to take criticism with good humor. If you are a major league baseball player, you get far more of it than any of the rest of us do. But players really shouldn't do stuff like this: