9/12 Gameday Thread: Drive begin championship series

I've seen quite a bit of Kannapolis this year, the last look was just 2 weeks ago. There top end pitchers have all been promoted: Alec Hansen, Dane Dunning and Bernardo Flores. The lineup is long though, they're led by recent draftees: 1st rounder (3B) Jake Burger and 2nd rounder (1B) Gavin Sheets. Also Blake Rutherford who's been a bit of a disappointment so far but he can handle the bat. Joel Booker, Luis Gonzalez and Mitch Roman are all solid as well.

Greenville has the better pitching but Kanny can score. Should be a fun series
I have a 6 pack of premium beer riding on a Greenville win

In Asheville, that goes a long way. Great beer town.

This makes sense, as Mata wasn't going to be able to come back for Game 2 anyway, so Diaz was going to have to pitch one of the two. I guess you could say this would've given them Hernandez for Game 5 on regular rest, but this is about development still.

Helps that Diaz was good down the stretch too.

this beer talk reminds me I need a trip to Sam's quick mart in Durham to reload. I saw that Cigar city is finally moving their beer into NC.

Well, he technically had thrown more the previous year, and last year would've had XST as well. But a fair point that capping him at one more start makes sense.

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but this will mark the first day without a sox-related box score to check (either Minors or Majors) in a long, long time. Tear.

Castellanos at 1B would give us the immortal Tucker Tubbs coming in fresh out of the bullpen.

You ever notice how some guys just seem to always to be playing for a championship? Tom Brady, Jonny gnomes, etc.

Is dalbec one of those type guys?

I have a hard time seeing Dalbec as any sort of future MLer at this point. If I was ranking I'd have him outside my top 15 maybe 20. He must have twice as many 2+ K games as 0K games. Unless it's all related to injury (he hasn't gotten any better later in year) I'm just completely out on him.

Tell him if he likes strikeouts this much, he can start pitching again.

So the bolded part is easy to say in the abstract, but then you have to start ranking the guys and it's hard to find enough to put ahead of him. Things start thinning out very quickly at that point.

I agree that his year has been brutal, but considering that he apparently had a broken hamate and had surgery on it, I want to wait and see what happens next year. If this is happening again, he'll fall pretty quickly for me outside of the top 20. 2017 has been bad, but in 2016 he had probably the best season for a Lowell hitter since this site's inception. You can't really just ignore that and focus only on the k's this year.

At the very least, he did close the regular season on a bit of a tear (while still striking out a ton), so there's momentum heading into next season.

And topically, Dalbec knocked in the 13th inning go ahead run on a double and scored a needed insurance run in the 8-7 victory.

I can't see how Dalbec doesn't get a pass for this year, I don't think I've ever seen a player recover from replacement or removal of a hamate in less than a year, often longer.

Dalbec also had about a .250 Iso after he came back.

Strikeouts are frustrating, but you can succeed in the majors if you hit for power and play defense even if you're striking out 200 times a year. The flip side of that is there's no guarantee that Dalbec would strike out "only" 200 times a year.