Sunday Bantering: Vlad Out of Lineup Again

There are tarps on the field in Pittsburgh. It looks like the game might be delayed but they figure to play,

Vladimir Guerrero isn’t in today’s lineup again.

There is no word from the Jays on his wrist, but obviously, it is still bothering him. Belt in at first. He had a good day with the bat yesterday. We’ll see how it goes today, but he might be another lesson in not jumping to conclusions off a slow start. We get the lesson often enough.

Yesterday’s scorecard was another advertisement for Robo Umps. As usual, the team trailing was favoured. Umpires are human, you do kind of lean toward the team that is behind. But this one was particularly bad. The Called Strike accuracy was very low.

Vida Blue passed away. He was just 73. Blue was one of the best pitchers of my youth and one I liked a lot. Maybe it was the 1.82 ERA in 1971, in 312 innings, when I was starting to notice baseball.

The A’s were one of my early favourite teams. Dick Williams was an interesting manager, old school, yell at the players, yell at the umps. Yell a lot. Owner Charlie Finley was an interesting guy too. Good team or bad, he kept them in the news.

Blue was one of those examples of how pitching a ton of innings in your early 20s can wreck an arm. Through his age 30 season, he was 170-120, with a 3.12 ERA in 2664 innings. In the ten seasons from 1971 to 1980, he had over 200 innings 9 times and over 250 innings seven times.

After his age-30 season, he was 39-41 with a 3.83 ERA in 129 games, 111 starts in 678.2 innings.

Blue didn’t get much love from the Hall of Fame voter, never getting more than 8.7% of the vote in his four years on the ballot. That seems a mistake to me.