Bud Black.
It always comes back to the dread captain Bud Black, sailing the seven seas of mediocrity. I had let him go. I had cast off the shackles of the man whose first name insists on a friendship I never agreed to. He is the producer of so many blurbs in so many different ways. He is the tower of celestial creation, a pillar of stardust whose suns all go white dwarf despite the promise of a Goldilocks zone. If you got all that, get down on your hands and knees and try not bump anything as you crawl into my inflatable planetarium, and give me a quiet high five as our teacher tries to remember any constellations beyond the Dippers and Orion’s Belt.
Back to Black. I was wandering through league leader info yesterday, and I saw that Elias Diaz is his .345. Heck the what is going on here? Surely this is a simple rounding error, and also how could Diaz accrue enough at bats to qualify as a league leader? And then I looked, and he’s played in 40+ games out of 49! Heck the what indeed!
Maybe he’s changed? This old dog is playing Tovar every day too. He’s played McMahon 40+ as well. Has he turned a new leaf? Brenton Doyle was called up and played in 24 games.
Perhaps…and follow me here…what if Oli Marmol and Bud Black did a body switch. Their consciousness’s trapped, and also trapped coaching their vexing teams. Bud reunited with Nolan Arenado. Oli just kind of united with the whole Colorado thing. Stranger things have happened. I mean, Paul Dejong has quietly decided to be a good hitter for Bud Marmol.
A Blurbstomp Reminder
We will analyze player blurbs from a given evening, knowing that 1-2 writers are usually responsible for all the player write-ups posted within an hour of the game results. We will look at:
Flowery Diction – how sites juice up descriptions of player performance
Q and Q – when a site contradicts a player valuation on back-to-back blurbs
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Syndrome – instances of updates that don’t update anything
The hope is that by season’s end, we’ll all feel more confident about our player evaluations when it comes to the waiver wire. We will read blurbs and not be swayed by excessive superlatives, faulty injury reporting, and micro-hype. I will know that I have done my job when Grey posts, and there isn’t a single question about catchers that he did not address in his post. Onward to Roto Wokeness!
Flowery Diction
Bradley yielded four runs on nine hits while striking out seven in a loss to the Blue Jays on Tuesday.
Bradley recorded seven strikeouts and didn’t hand out a free pass, needing just 80 pitches (58 strikes) to complete four frames against a formidable Toronto lineup. He scattered nine hits, including a solo homer to Isaac Paredes in the fifth inning. He’ll carry a pristine 4.44 ERA into a scary home matchup on Sunday against the Dodgers.
Source: Rotoworld
Pristine – adj
in its original condition, unspoiled
clean and fresh as if never used
We’ve had a lot of adjectives to define a good pitching performance here at the ‘Stomp. Pristine is ill-fitting in the sport of baseball, especially for pitchers, whose arms are so far from unused they best resemble gnarled, sinewy legs. But to refer to a 4.44 ERA? I guess we need to create a cleanliness scale and figure out where Taj lives on it.
| Pristine | |
| Lived-in | |
| Messy | Taj? |
| Dingy | Taj? |
| Filthy |
Once more we are faced with a blurb that trades basic meaning for bombastic exuberance. I think I’m missing a term here, but “Lived-in” makes the most sense. It’s clean, like when you’re wealthy enough to hire a deep-cleaning service twice-a-month, and you have no children or pets and everyone trims their body hair outside. Pristine is like a staged home for a catalog or an open house. Messy is a normal, even innocent I dare say. Filthy is the stories of twin brothers whose bodies were discovered under 70 years worth of newspaper towers that collapsed upon them. I should have done this in order, or maybe created another column in this table. If I didn’t, it’s because I have children and pets and my glass house is dingy.
Anyway, Taj Bradley is somewhere between messy and dingy. You don’t want to be there either.
Q &Q
Garrett didn’t factor into the decision in Saturday’s 1-0 win over the Giants, allowing only one hit and one walk over 6.1 scoreless innings. He struck out eight.
The southpaw exited a 0-0 tie after throwing 76 pitches and generating an impressive 29 called or swinging strikes. Garrett’s eight strikeouts tied his season high, set in his previous outing, while the quality start was his first of 2023. Toss out his 11-run disaster against Atlanta at the beginning of May, and Garrett sports a 2.56 ERA, 1.09 WHIP and 41:6 K:BB through 38.2 innings while serving up only two homers. He could be headed for another ratio-spoiling start, however, as he lines up to take the mound next week in Coors Field.
Source: Rotowire
Nothing quite eats at me when I read a blurb such as this. Yeah, if you throw out Braxton Garrett’s monumental-ratio-apocalypse-11 ER start, his overall line would be quite tasty. Here’s another idea: What if we throw out that whole Cambodia thing, so Henry Kissinger doesn’t instantly go to hell when he dies? He hasn’t been that bad if you omit one of the worst things he’s ever done. How’s about that guy who murdered that reporter on a submarine? Besides that one instance, he’s fine and was a decent person to everyone he met. Or the persons responsible when making a green-colored sweets product, who decides to blaspheme and flavor it Apple instead of Lemon-Lime.
You get my point, hyperbole aside. The Lemon-Lime haters need to go pound sand, though.
It’s a fun exercise, but exactly after I read a few articles recommending him as a pick up a month ago, Garrett let in those 11 runs. He’s vigilant, and he will break your heart the moment you start him for your team. He knows.
So I’ll pick him up tomorrow. His CSW% is one of the best in the league. He will be obliterated.
Q&Q
Josh Bell went 1-for-3 with two RBI and a walk in Cleveland’s loss to the White Sox Wednesday.
Bell did leave four runners on, but managed a double to open scoring in the first and took a bases-loaded walk in the seventh to drive in another run. Bell has cooled down considerably since the end of April and is just not hitting for power at all, with a .250/.390/.271 line in his last 15 games. Hopefully the double can get him rolling again.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
The end of April you say? How hot was Josh Bell in the last week of April, friends?
6/30 with 2 runs scored, 2 home runs, and 4 RBI
He was basically at the Mendoza line, something made even starker by a BABIP that almost perfectly matched his output (AVG .222/BABIP .211). How did he do the week after that?
7/27 with zero runs, zero home runs, and 3 RBI
A true “Buzz’s girlfriend — Woof” line if I’ve ever seen it. But he’s hit only 3 homers all season, scored only 7 runs, driven in a fine 21 RBI…but he’s done all that starting almost every single game the Guardians. That doesn’t speak of a player who was ever hot in any sense of the word. The Guardians have a hit-to-contact approach that every team in the MLB knows about, so now there’s no one on base for Bell to drive in when he does get his weak single here or there.
The guy wasn’t hot at the end of April. He finally hit a statistical threshold wherein the great god of probabilities shrugged her shoulders and said, “Meh, he’s probably a bit overdue.” Bell will hit 2 homers in a week a few more times this season. He will be as cold as a witch’s tit while doing so, however.
Flowery Diction
Brent Rooker went 2-for-4 with an RBI single in a loss to the Astros on Saturday
Rooker put the Athletics’ on the board with his fourth-inning knock, which plated Ryan Noda. The 28-year-old’s multi-hit effort was his fourth in the last 10 games and snapped him out of a brief 0-for-8 skid over his last two games that included a highly atypical four-strikeout tally in Friday’s series opener.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
Going hitless for two games is now considered a skid, is it? Jeepers, it doesn’t take much these days. In a game where a guy goes 3 for 10 on average for his career and he’s Hall of Fame-bound, going hitless for two days is, well, normal? They’re just normal men, hitting the ball and usually missing. On a technical level, if we were to say this was one of those tiny skid marks left on the er…pavement, then sure, I accept the language usage. I just think of skid as denoting poor performance over a measurable amount of time.
For instance, I would put the minimum of 5 games for an honest night’s skid. I don’t think we have to make another table
| Skid | 1-4 games | Law of averages |
| (Bit of a) rut | 5-7 games | Never understood this once I realized where the term “rut” comes from. Wouldn’t that mean you’re excited and things are looking up? WINK |
| Slump | 8-14 games | Standard, comes with color commentators talking about it all the time |
| Drought | 15-20 games | Standalone articles exist in service of explaining your current situation, and social media should be deleted |
| Laying face down in the shower | 20+ | Rotten luck matched passable skills, |
This kind of thing seems to be borne out of the Draft Kings/Parlay World mindset that has crept into every spare crevice of the hobby we love. This isn’t even a case where Rooker needs to regress to the mean, because again, he’s just normal men. Teams are scouting him now, and he’s getting different pitches, arm angles, playful stares, pouty smiles, and all the other ways teams mess with each other’s success.
Since this blurb was posted, he’s actually bypassed a skid and gone into a rut. The opposite is happening to Christopher Morel right now, and you know the short-sellers are circling like vultures waiting to scream, “SEE NO HITS IN LAST TWO GAMES HE’S COOKED JUST LIKE I SAID I WASN’T WRONG.” These people are abnormal and guilty men. Not like our sweet Rooker. He’s just normal men.
He’s just innocent men.
