Okay, hands up all of you who had figured in March of this year that Luis Perez would pitch 50 innings with the Jays this year.
No one?
Okay, how many figured he might get a cup of coffee?
Well then, who among you knew who the hell Luis Perez was coming into this season? And if you're getting all like Horshack, straining to raise your arm until you throw out your shoulder, shouting "Ow ow ow...Mr. Kot-Tao! I knew who he was," then just stop. You didn't. You saw him on the 40-man roster and thought: "Who dat?"
Perez's start Sunday, impressive though it may have been, was far too small a snapshot for us to draw any real conclusions. But in a year in which the Jays have required 11 pitchers to take the ball at the start of the game, Perez has been a pleasantly surprising asset.
He's shown himself to be a respectable arm who can throw hard and down in the zone and eat bullpen innings, and to get through 162 games, you need someone dependable to do just that.
One more question: Who figured that on Aug. 22, Perez would be rocking the same 0.3 WAR as Jason Frasor, Frank Francisco, and Shawn Camp? And that he would have produced more value than Jon Rauch, Octavio Dotel and Kyle Drabek combined?
Oh, of course you did, smarty pants.
Frankly, on Franky Frank
When Frank Francisco couldn't answer the call yesterday afternoon, we saw mostly joyous exaltations of Casey Janssen and jovial ribbing of the Jays sorta-not-really closer. And yet, it bears mentioning that Francisco's output since his terrible outing in Cleveland on July 7 has been pretty exemplary with just one run allowed in 13.1 innings with 11 strikeouts and one walk.
Hitters have posted just a .204 OBP against him, and he hasn't allowed an inherited runner to score.
So before you make your comments about how it won't be a big loss to replace Franky with whatever random organizational arm we can scrounge up, think about how that tomato can is going to replace those numbers as opposed to a couple of disaster outings in the distant annals of the season.
Kyle Davies is a Blue Jay
A number of you flipped this news to us on the weekend, and the weird thing is that when we heard that the Royals were giving him the heave-ho, we had this sneaking suspicion that the Jays would pick him up. We won't embarrass our self with some sort of rationalization of how he's an arm that might have something left and worth a flyer because he's really been terrible since his not-awful 2008 season.
Then we reach for out standard "but still, you never know...," only to be reminded of how Jo-Jo Reyes' opponents have posted a .910 OPS against him since his rebirth as an Oriole.
And yet, he's an arm. You never know.
House of Grim
Is there any more depressing sight than watching your team struggle against the A's in Oakland? Watching as much of the games as we could (usually on some errand-induced delay), it was just a depressing vibe to see the Jays whiff and pop up into the expansive foul territory of the deserted Alameda County Mausoleum.
For whatever history that team has in that market, they've got to get out of that stadium and out of that town.
The San José A's has a ring to it.
