Bertz

Cam Sisneros should probably be on the plane with Kepley when he goes to Tenn. He's not like destroying the league but with his age it's like Ayers where you've gotta push him.

Surprised Wicks only went 5 especially given that they didn't hand the ball to Assad right after

Yeah I want Jordan getting that spot next turn through the rotation over Assad

Assad is also seemingly lined up to pitch today. I assume he piggybacks Wicks, but I wonder if we see anything in how they're deployed that hints at how the team is leaning to backfill Cabrera.

Arbitrary endpoints but whatever. Since 4/28: 76 PAs, 26.3% K, 11.8% BB, .284/.355/.612, 7 dongs Contact numbers are trending in the right direction while the groundball rate is normalizing. I have a feeling those are not independent. My guess is he got too uppercutty early in the year and piled up the K's (and dongs) and now he's found a bit more of a sustainable balance.

Kevin Alcantara with yet another dong. Strikeout rate steadily falling over the last ~month as well

I love Wednesday AM games BTW is Mathis hurt? He hasn't played since Thursday

I'm hoping McGwire only going 1.2 is about conserving innings and nothing nefarious.

The Wing news is exciting but I do think I'm slightly more excited to confirm Sanders is alive

McGwire/Coppola piggybacking is so fun, let's try to top the 14 K's from last go, gonna be close

How is Naz still just 21? Glad he'll be back on the mound. Honestly there's probably a decent argument that he should just focus on building innings. Unlike someone like JP Wheat Mule's control issues tend to be a "one bad inning" sort of deal. Focus on building innings and hopefully some of those rough edges buff out simply from experience.

I presume Blach is just up for today. Go Rea to Blach, swap Thielbar in tomorrow, and have a fully rested bullpen for the Brewers series.

Fedde has pretty massive reverse splits so far this year. That's probably nothing but curious if the lineup ends up reflecting it.

Having a position player alreadypitching in the 6th is a pretty sad state of affairs. Velasquez with quite the stinker for Iowa tonight

If they're not that far away from being a very good team why would they trade him?

Martin is not even close to 1.62 ERA caliber but he seems legitimately very good. Against Taillon the Sox probably ought to be considered favorites in this game? How long has it been since the Sox were favored in a game against us without having Crochet on the mound? Back in '22?

Carter Trice is starting to be worth paying a little attention to

Speaking of interesting, Braylon Myers?? Longenhagen snuck a blurb about him into his recent list Wicks also appears fixed, which it's probably not a coincidence that it's after approximately a spring training's worth of minor league outings. Swap him out for Trent Thornton (who he weirdly looks like) next week kthxbye

Do we know anything about him? Certainly his age and his production and this quick promo are great signs but I don't remember him as a bonus baby?

Yeah I have to keep reminding myself that Myrtle was a nightmare offensively last year until mid-late June. Something like Tomas and Cabada looking great a month from now would flip this totally on its head.

Things that stood out to me while pulling together my personal rankings: - The farm is missing a capstone up top. Rojas hasn't hit since coming off the IL, Wiggins got hurt, Conrad stayed hurt, Hartshorn is a million miles aways, and Ramirez isn't especially tooled up. I like all these guys a lot but they should probably be your 2-6 or ideally your 3-7 - The farm's arrow is probably still up despite graduating Mo and Wiggins' injury, Like if you made a list of stock ups vs. stock downs the former would probably be twice as long as the latter - Related to the above, it was actually a little tough to cut down to 20 names, whereas in the back of last year it was tough to get to 20 names - The pitching situation is certainly not *good* yet but it's looking much less dire. Sanders/McGwire/Caple all seem like pretty significant breakouts (assuming Sanders' injury isn't major). There are several smaller breakouts like Coppola/Flanagan/Jerzembeck as well. Wing and Reid each appear to be what we wanted them to be on draft night. I think there was a point last year maybe right before the draft where you might legitimately only have Wiggins and Sanders as pitchers in your top 20 and that's not even close to still the case - The second-tier bats at Myrtle aren't getting it done after hot starts. You wonder how much of early April was Southisene/Hartshorn/Mathis working the body and then the pitchers getting ambushed by the Lovich's of the world while trying to catch their breath. Once Hartshorn gets promoted that lineup will be pretty sad until the draft or until the ACL guys (none of whom are crushing it currently?) start percolating up