Series Thread: Going to the first place Astros? Or the world is coming to an end series

[donaldson79]

Big reason why I don't really expect much from Smolinski.

Good thing too. B/c we're getting damn near nothing from him.

 

[WastinSomeTime]

Big reason why I don't really expect much from Smolinski.

Yeah, he really out did himself last year and I hoped it would last this year. But so far it hasn't. He may be headed to AAA when Hamilton shows up and it would be good for him.

 

[saddles]

I just know I saw a guy that if he ever got it together was going to be the key ingredient to the trade and not Lee. He had years left on his contract along with strength and a strong arm. It was frustrating when he would be called up and would start off great then revert back to his bad habits. But I know I never gave up on the guy I was just frustrated because I knew it was there in him somewhere. But when they sent him down it was not that they were giving up on him (maybe some fans were) but they were trying to right him and each time they would. It just took a while to take at the MLB level.

I was mainly talking about the fans being impatient. Too many fans think a guy should come up and perform right away and many times it takes a few hundred at bats to get acclimated to the big leagues.

 

[saddles]

He was 24-27 years old, you don't keep those guys in the minors for long usually, they've had a chance to show who they are, if you're 24 and still can't make the transition to a ML job by then, then you should be expecting to be collateral damage, they're clogs in the system at that point, by this age you should be on a ML roster and challenging for a job, it worked out for Cruz but this is far from impatience, but only b/c we had the luxury at the time of doing that

I'm only saying its not unreasonable to have had these thoughts and it certainly wasn't impatience

Looking at his AAA numbers its kind of startling he didn't get more opportunities before he did, but when he did, he didn't produce and that was the problem

No matter how old you are when you come up it takes some time to get acclimated to big league pitching and it takes playing on a regular bases. Like I said before Nelson really only had one two month stretch where he played on a regular basis where he struggled. He performed fine in late 2006 and again in the second half of 2007. To me it was unreasonable for fans who had followed baseball for very long to give up on him at that point the way many did.

 

[WastinSomeTime]

I was mainly talking about the fans being impatient. Too many fans think a guy should come up and perform right away and many times it takes a few hundred at bats to get acclimated to the big leagues.

Agree with you there.