5/1 Gameday Thread: Just 2 games - Trey Ball & Rowdy Roniel

I'll be at the Sea Dogs game in Hartford today. Eager to see how Devers looks in person.

1) His three homers last week were his only hits, incidentally.

2) With Tobias up to Portland (with Kemp joining the Salem Sox), I wondered if Tavarez would go up to Pawtucket. Ryan Court just fractured his foot, opening a spot. However, with Selsky back down, I'm sure they want him to play. Junior Lake probably needs to start hitting, though.

You're going to sleep really well tonight.....I just know it.

Does anyone know if there's something mechanical (like the swing-path revolution going on, despite you know, Ted Williams advocating loft 60 years ago) for Lin's hot start? He's always had some talent...big bonus back in the day...but he's always been a grounder machine. Curious if he's pulling a Murphy et al.

Devers just hit a home run to center field.

Cosart can really lose his control in a hurry.

He is pretty small. I think the slg.% is a temporary aberration...Ted adherence or not.

That's a textbook definition of arbitrary endpoints

I left my phone in the car last night. That was very annoying, but thanks to my incredible perseverance, I live to see another day.

The Devers home run was a bomb, I was pumped I got to see it. And he walked too, which is big for him. He doesn't seem like he's overly aggressive or has a bad eye, so it's kind of confusing to me that he doesn't walk more. I didn't get a good sense of him in the field, but he didn't look like he wasn't fluid so that's a good sign.

Trey Ball actually looked good. Velocity was there according to the stadium radar gun (~92 on his FB). He kind of got into a lot of deep counts (seemed like his secondaries were always out of the zone), but by his standards this was a great start for him.

Danny Mars had 3 hard hit balls, but none of them found a gap.

Lin seriously looked good. He was pesky at the plate, I believe drawing a walk once, but either way he worked the pitcher in his ABs. He's a slap hitter and probably always will be, but he looked solid still. Defensively his range looked really good, he and Devers are a great left side, maybe even better than Boston's sadly.

Dunkin Donuts Park in Hartford is awesome though. It was a joke how long it took to be made, but it turned out to be arguably the nicest minor league park I've been to, although I'm partial to Hadlock.

I feel a major difference between Lin and Almanzar, though, is that the bar for Lin's offense is much, much lower. For a utilityman like Lin to improve from org depth to possible up-and-down type, he just needs to hit some to supplement his game, whereas Almanzar's only path to the majors was that he needed to really hit. Lin's obviously not a legit .250 Iso guy that he was in April, but an improvement from his career baseline of around .075 to maybe .120 or so probably pushes him ahead of the Deven Marrero and Mike Miller types.