Is There An Echo In Here?

What the hell was that? I am sorely in need of some consolation, brothers and sisters. A weekend without baseball, followed by a train wreck in the Motor City, has left me sitting here listening to Skip James with my head in my hands (well, my head was in my hands, but I had to lift it up momentarily to type; as soon as I’m finished it’s going right back down).

It’s bad, you know. Six stinking hits. A couple errors. A shaky afternoon for the bullpen, and, most alarmingly, for J.C. Romero, who seems to have gone feral on us again. Once again the bottom of the order looked like, well, the bottom of the order. Some of these fellas need to be taken out behind the woodshed and given a good ass thrashing.

As for Brad Radke, and that three-spot in the first inning, what the hell can I say? I already said it, but maybe it bears repeating:

There’s no rational explanation for the funny business in the first inning so far this year, at least so far as a team-wide phenomenon goes. Where Brad Radke is concerned, however, it goes back a lot further than this year, and is pretty easily explained by the kind of pitcher he is. Radke prides himself on throwing strikes, and isn’t a guy who ever seems comfortable wasting a pitch. He’s a deeply conservative operator, and at this point in his career isn’t going to change much. That said, he’s never had a single truly dominating pitch that allows him to get away with mistakes, and opposing teams know by now what he has, and that he’s pretty much always going to be around the plate. It seems like everybody he’s faced over the last couple years knows the book on Radke backwards and forwards, and they’re clearly being proactive in the early going and taking aggressive cuts. Hitting is incredibly difficult, but you give the other team a huge advantage when they know damn well you’re going to throw it somewhere over the plate and have a fairly limited bag of tricks at your disposal.

Radke’s a smart pitcher, and he generally does a good job of making little adjustments and settling in as the game goes along, but it sure seems like if he’d take a more unpredictable and even erratic approach right out of the gate he’d save himself the trouble of having to make those adjustments in the first place.

Right now I just hope like hell they get those games in in Kansas City, because I need to get this bad taste out of my mouth in a hurry.