EMK19

Gotta say this is my general thoughts of him as well. His lack of K ability/no real threatening second/third pitch and his inconsistent command are my main gripes with him. I do like his ground ball ability and especially with the infield we have right now I feel he is still a decent weapon to have in the pen when used in right situations. Still would use Lowe over him in high leverage situations any day. I also wonder if him pitching from the stretch creates the consistency issue for him in the pen; I've noticed that he's the only guy out of our pen who pitches from a wind up with no one on base, which is obviously a carry over from his time as a starter. Might explain why he looks much better when starting off an inning but increasingly shaky as he puts runners on base/comes on with runners already on base?

Yeah Pillar's arm IMO it is of more or less average strength. Definitely not to be relied on to throw out someone at the plate tagging at 3rd, but I guess it takes a pretty special CF arm to be a true threat for those. It's a bit worrying that our starting OF doesn't have much of an arm threat for runners tagging home though, with Revere's arm basically being equal to that of Shannon Stewart, Pillar's not being strong enough and Bautista's seemingly rapidly declining in strength/accuracy (although there is that injury that may still be affecting him). Runners may still not run easily on Bautista due to the reputation he's built up over the years though, or at least I'd hope that's still the case.

Still can't forget the 1990 season where we lost the division out to the Red Sox on the final day of the season in Baltimore (though it was Memorial Stadium back then). f*cking Tom Brunansky catch at Fenway... then the Orioles hit the walk off hr off Henke just to rub it in further. Would love for us to clinch the division there this time 25 years later.

Bonds and Drabek I think did so in 1990. One thing I do wonder is if just that label of "Cy Young Winner 2015" would further increase his asking price as a FA... Of course he's won it before and even if he doesn't win it he's still going to get tons of money, but I do wonder if it'll play into it at all.

I'm sure they were playing shallower than normal, but to put on something that extreme of a shift as to put them near the edge of the grass would show real bad confidence of the arms in the outfield by the manager (which is partly true with our team with Revere and Pillar's arms being bad, but you still don't want to admit and show that). The runner may still hold on a shallow fly, especially to a guy with threatening arm like Bautista, and ideally you'd want the fielder to have momentum running in to make the catch to unleash the throw rather than tracking back to catch with no momentum for the throw.

Non throwing, so his glove hand side, I'd think it will affect his glove range if he has to play through pain.

Not sure if any Jays get it... Pillar has the best chance IMO but there's Kiermaier he has to compete with. Catching Dickey has made Martin's stats look worse than it should be, and JD's been solid but probably has too many throwing errors compared to the others.

Saw clip of him in the dugout yesterday lifting his arms and going over Revere's swing, so at least he feels better enough now to lift his arms without pain, which is a start.

I remember it well during his time with us, and even now Pillar's arm isn't that great either. I wish we could transplant Anthony Gose' arm (and arm only) onto either him or Revere (and Bats' arm has died off a lot too) as I feel that it may potentially be costly later, it's one of our overlooked weaknesses in D IMO... I'm sure the opposing teams will be very aggressive tagging on a fly and stretching out doubles/triples against us come playoffs.

If I had to make a guess, if anything, I think maybe not bringing Osuna in there was in order to preserve Osuna's confidence as a closer, since that situation looked very bleak already. Definitely wouldn't be good for his psyche to have a team walk off on him, especially since he also had that blown save recently.

Still don't get why when we had Martin on 1st late in the 8th with Goins/Pillar/Pennington coming up, we put no pinch runners/pinch hitters to try to manufacture a run (especially not pinch running Martin and letting Goins face a LHB killing specialist)... this is September and we have enough personnel to make multiple moves even after Carrera/Cola was earlier used. Gotta play to win on the road...

We couldn't hit at all. Teheran, and their relief crew kept us off balance with sliders all day, I think we struck out 10+ times today or something like that. The top 3 in our lineup went 0-for, and when that happens you know we are in for a tough night...

Yeah, the past two weeks or so it seems as if both teams either win and lose at the same time or each respective series results end up being the same (besides the head to head matchups, obviously). We had this trend early September of 1993 as well (Jays hit a slight funk but so did the Yanks) before we picked it up for good and ran away with it... it psychologically gives the team that is ahead a nice lift.

If we were actually going for a double play he would have been the right guy, but since we were clearly not we would have been better off with a Strikeout guy like Osuna in that situation instead. Osuna was about to come out too then called back, looking very confused... very, very rarely have I seen Gibby come out then not make a move, that was pretty uncharacteristic for him to be indecisive and ask Sanchez his opinion there.

Two straight ugly games by our offence is kind of concerning... although it's been against some good pitching, that's not going to be changing tm vs. Miller. Some awful swings on breaking pitches by our key guys today, I'm sure Pierzynski picked up on that and will continue to call it that way... really hope that it isn't our top 3 aren't all hitting slumps at the same time here.

I'd have walked him just to have the force play at home on. Either way you'd be playing for two separate outs.

What a miserable game. I knew we kind of blew our best chance in that inning when we had Teheran on the ropes with bases loaded while he couldn't throw a strike, but Revere just had a bad game hitting out there tonight. Smoak also had a horrible game defensively today as he was basically responsible for two runs today that lost us the ballgame. He's been good all year there but let this be a reminder to him to stay sharp, we can't afford to have him choke like that anymore down the stretch. One thing I don't get is playing so conservatively late in the game when we had Martin on base with 1 out with Goins and Pennington coming up. Why not pinch run with Pompey and pinch hit Goins when it's a tough lefty he has to face out there? This is September and we had enough guys to make moves... and you play to win late in tie ballgames on the road. No idea why Gibbons was so conservative there. Funny thing is, he was switched out for Barney later anyway... so... why wasn't this made earlier? And don't get why Sanchez was out there for a second inning out there either, from what I've seen this year he's been pretty bad once he is past his one good inning of work as a setup guy. Just a flat performance all around, no one seemed inspired to win out there tonight for some reason, or maybe it was just that miserable dead atmosphere in Atlanta... need at least EE back as soon as possible and need to get back home, there's been some really uncharacteristically awful flat games from this road trip reminding me of pre-Tulo days which is slightly concerning... Afraid we may slip again tomorrow with us facing Miller tm even if we have Price going, the bats have been really flat the past two games.

Man, this is going to be a fast game, Teheran works as fast as Buehrle does.

He can bring Travis, Saunders and Izturis with him while at it, lol. Wish we had a senzu bean right now, that's for sure.

Well, we'd have to see where both the Yanks and the Jays will be by the next Jays/Yanks series rolls around, perhaps Yanks may still shuffle the rotation to align Tanaka to face us (he could prob also use more rest) if they feel they still have a shot at catching us at that point. But then it would be a question of whether or not Yanks even have the depth for the rotation to even try that at this point, it'd probably be risky for sure. I recall we lost the series vs. Braves at home, can't recall much from it but I do remember Miller beating us and winning the one game in extras. On paper we should be good for a sweep or at least a series win, but we said that about the Phillies too and came out with only splits so still cautious about it... especially because of uncertainty with Buehrle and if EE ends up needing more time for his finger issues.

I'd go with Astros. Tough pitchers no doubt but we tee off Lefties for most part so I like our lineup's chances even if its against Keuchel/Kazmir. Their lineup doesn't scare me and as a collective group, a bit less experienced in the playoffs than the Rangers' bunch.

I'm still confident that we're good enough to see the rest of this through to the division title. To still have just as solid middle infield defence out there despite Tulo being out is comforting at least. Hopefully Pennington can at least get back to his career average at the plate so that he contributes even a little bit at the plate. Good point, but I was thinking in similarity to last year's hack-at-literally-everything version of Pillar, his approach somewhat improved in comparison thus far this year.

Thankfully at least it's not his throwing shoulder, but I'd assume it'd still affect his fielding in terms of his range, stretching to his right/left for the ball...

I'm actually worried that Pillar may go out there today and actually try too hard to hit everything at the plate, feeling responsible for what happened yesterday and trying to redeem himself... which is probably the worst thing he can do... I really would be in favour of giving Pompey a game in place of him but of course to Gibby Carrera > Pompey so....

Yeah, it's pretty much similar to what we had before the Tulo trade, just Revere in place of Reyes who is more or less contributing similarly offensively (if not better). And that offence was already pretty good (though Travis is missed we also had a spell of good ball while being without him in there).