Mormon Baseball

Archive for April, 2014

The Round Rock Express’ Adam Rosales started to make the case for a return to the majors last week, going 8 for 18 (.444) at the plate with 7 walks. The walks alone are quite stunning—he nearly doubled the number of times he walked for the season, and jumped to 6th in walks in the AAA Pacific Coast League. For the season, he is batting .254 with 4 home runs, 13 runs scored and 10 rbis in 71 at bats—perhaps not enough to get him back to the majors immediately, but certainly the beginning of an argument for his return (should there be an opening).

Rosales isn’t the only Mormon in the minors who excelled at the plate last week. He was followed closely by the Beloit Snappers’ Jaycob Brugman, who was 9 for 23 (.391) with a home run and 4 walks, and by Rancho Cucamonga’s Adam Law (California League – A+), who was 11 for 30 (.367) with 7 runs scored and 3 rbis. For the season Law’s .325 average is close behind that of Marcus Littlewood, who continues to dominate the Midwest League (A) with a .395 average (1st in the league).

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While its not unusual for an individual player to have an off week, its much more unusual for all of the Mormon players to have poor or mediocre performances at the same time. But this past week was like that.

Perhaps the strongest performance was from the Royals’ pitcher Jeremy Guthrie, who improved his era in two starts last week. But Guthrie’s performance can’t really be called stellar: a 4.05 era for the two starts, a loss, 16 hits and a walk with 6 earned runs over 13.1 innings pitched. Meh…

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The New York Times recently published an interactive map, A Map of Baseball Nation, which shows what team is most liked in each zip code across the U.S., based on what team they have “liked” on Facebook. Its kind of fun to see the geographic spread of the fans.

I was particularly intrigued to see how Utah appeared — looking at the county by county data no team gets the majority, and, I was surprised to find out, the Yankees and Red Sox were the most popular teams, depending on the area. Why would that be so? Do Mormons prefer the Yankees and Red Sox?

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After starting the season slow, the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes’ Adam Law stepped up his performance last week to something like what he did last year, his first after being drafted. Law was 9 for 20 (.450) in 6 games, with 7 runs scored, 5 rbis, 7 walks and 2 stolen bases. And Law raised his batting average for the season to .298, while planting a foot among the statistics leaders in batting average, on-base percentage and in stolen bases. Its the kind of performance Law was known for last year, when he tore up first the Arizona rookie league, and then the Pioneer league, leading to his promotion to the California League (A+) instead of an A-level league with those who were drafted the same time he was. Is it too much to expect him to reach AA by the end of the year?

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The backup role is hard. I’ve wondered for some time what toll the backup role takes on a player’s performance. Take John Buck, for example. As a backup this year the catcher has played in just 4 games so far, while last year he had played in 16 games by April 20th. And last year at this point Buck had a .293 batting average, while this year he is hitting just .231. How much of this difference is because Buck isn’t playing every day this year? And how much is because he began last year on fire?

This past week, despite his backup role, Buck was .333 at the plate with a walk and 2 strike outs, raising his batting average for this year to near his career average. Still, in a backup role its hard to have much higher expectations of Buck.

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Its easy to get excited with the statistics in the initial weeks of the season, when extreme performances haven’t yet been tempered by the passage of time. Still, several Mormon players, such as Memphis Redbirds’ pitcher Boone Whiting, already are turning in great statistics. Whiting currently leads the AAA Pacific Coast League with 20 strike outs. He also has a 1.98 era in 13.2 innings over 3 starts.

And Whiting isn’t the only outstanding Mormon pitcher in the first couple weeks of the season. Taylor Cole, of the Dunedin Blue Jays in the Florida State League (A+) is also leading his league in strike outs (with 16), and sports a 0.51 whip and 2.31 era in 11.2 innings. Both Whiting and Cole could end up advancing if they keep up this performance—to AA in Cole’s case, and to the majors in Whiting’s case.

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Its often hard to know what to expect from veterans near the end of their careers. In the case of Kyle Farnsworth, the Mets were ready to relegate him to the minors, given a poor performance in spring training, but the injury of closer Bobby Parnell brought him up to the majors and gave him the setup role for Parnell’s replacement. And Farnsworth has blossomed, his fastball is up 10 mph to the mid 90s, and his performance has been excellent—1.59 ERA and 1.06 WHIP in 5 2/3rds innings—inline with the best years of his career. At 37, the question is whether or not he can keep up this level.

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Its amazing how different the regular season can be from spring training. Last week, Elliot Johnson was on top of the Mormon players in spring training, and this week, in the regular season, he is on the bottom, while Jacoby Ellsbury, mediocre in most of spring training, has transformed into the best performer among the Mormon players.

Ellsbury started the season in 3s — hitting .333 (7 for 21), scoring 3 runs, stealing 3 bases and walking three times. All this he managed while his team (the Yankees) managed a mediocre performance.

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