8/24 ML Gameday Thread: Brian Johnson debuts for Salem

Boy the way Myles Smith is pitching, it looks like he will be one to follow in Greenville (?) next season.

Player IP H R ER BB SO HR ERA
Myles Smith 3.0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0.00

The GCL team seems to be focused on winning their division. Hopefully I will get a chance to see them one more time next week.

GCL wins. Three game lead with four to go.

Buchholz to pitch three innings/50 pitches for Lowell (@ Hudson Valley) tomorrow. If things go well, he will make a second minor league start on Friday and re-join the Red Sox after that (Sept. 4 vs. DET?).

Brian Johnson pitches 6 scoreless in his debut, with 4H 2BB 5K. Unfortunately, the 'pen frittered away his win ... and Mookie Betts, exhausted from slamming the ball and running around the bases yesterday, goes 0-4.

I've mentioned that I regard streakiness as a major upside indicator. It has to be the right kind of streakiness, though. A guy who runs hot and cold in 10-game chunks is probably not a guy who can do anything to fix that. A guy who has a great first half and an awful second half, or vice versa -- you wonder why the badness persisted so long, and that they're simply not adept at fixing their mechanics when they get screwed up.

But a guy whose season breaks down hot, cold, hot (or with one more cycle), with a massive difference between the segments, is a guy whom you can hope or even expect to improve. They've shown an ability to fix what isn't working; all they have to do is in the future is institute the fix more quickly. That described Carlos Pena before his breakout season with the Rays, and explains why he took a leap forward at that point. Kevin Youkilis' 2006 and 2007 were like that, too, after which some folks at SoSH declared that he would never hit 20 homers. I pointed out that he had easily sustained a 20-homer pace when hot, and that all he needed to do to reach that target, and become a much better hitter, was to not have a huge long slump mid-season. Which is exactly what he did.

This is Christian Vazquez' season so far:

.298 / .412 / .479 (29 G, 115 PA, 4/4 to 5/22)
.127 / .222 / .197 (20 G, 81 PA, 5/24 to 6/25)
.360 / .420 / .440 (40 G, 171 PA, 6/27 to date)

The massive slump began immediately after he went 4-4, 2 2B, 3B, HR, which suggests that he started thinking he was some kind of power hitter and got way out of his game. It's interesting that when he fixed the problem, he returned as a somewhat different hitter; his BB rate is .095 vs. .158 in the first hot streak, and his K rate is .089 vs. .123. So he's going significantly less deep in counts, which explains a good deal of the power outage (.101 drop in Iso), but he's become an excellent contact hitter (with some BABIP luck, doubtless, but the overall picture suggests it's mostly skill).

So the starting pitching was extremely good last night. I broke it down in this morning's Cup of Coffee. Can anyone remember a night with better performances across the board than this?