Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
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The debate over Blake DeWitt and Andy LaRoche has reached nauseating, intractable, Pierresque levels, with the two sides making no impact on each other. So the only thing I'll pass along is Joe Torre's rationale for his admitted preference for DeWitt, as told to Diamond Leung of the Press-Enterprise:
"A lot of the young guys, if they're not hitting well, will let it affect the other side," Torre said. "He (DeWitt) is pretty grounded.
"It's not affecting his defense. And he's going to give you an honest at-bat." ...
Torre said he was going by "feel" in choosing DeWitt to play the majority of the time.
"It probably worked against LaRoche that I've seen so much of DeWitt," Torre said. "It's not anything against LaRoche. Blake is filling the bill, so to speak."
Look, there's no two ways about it. LaRoche lost his job due to injury. There's nothing to indicate that LaRoche gives you a dishonest at-bat, or that he lets his hitting struggles affect his fielding. DeWitt just got a chance to earn his way into Torre's good graces. These things can change in a minute, but that's the story for now.
"It probably worked against LaRoche that I've seen so much of DeWitt," Torre said. "It's not anything against LaRoche. Blake is filling the bill, so to speak."
And with that, Joe Torre is officially Grady Little to me. Honeymoon's over, Joe.
Oh: and he gets paid $4 million a year.
Conspiracy theorists will tell you that whatever incriminating pictures of Torre that Scott Proctor, Tanyon Sturtze, and Miguel Cairo had are clearly now in DeWitt's possession.
I'd love to see him get a decent stretch of starts to see what he can do.
That's got to be one of the STUPIDEST things I've heard a manager say, recently at least. The fact is JOE, you don't know how Andy is going to react because you never play him and your 'honest effort' at 3B would have been benched last month by any other manager who wasn't brain dead.
6. While technically you're right, he wasn't the starter at 3B, there isn't any question that he would have been at the start of the season by the way he was outplaying Nomar in ST. Which of course begs the question as to what team torre was managing when Andy was tearing it up in the spring. That alone should be enough for torre to start him over DeWitt now.Then again just by the way DeWitt is playing most managers would have gone with LaRoche in June.
Beltre is signed through 2009, no?
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