5/24 Gameday Thread: Bello Will Not Falter; Salem vs WS MVP

Salem vs Strasburg lol

Pretty strong outing for Groome. ~62% of his pitches for strikes, 9 K’s against 2 BB’s over 6. I’ll take it.

Jay Groome has been somewhat forgotten. All of us are excited about Bello, Walter, and Gonzalez. But Jay has finally got healthy and is showing his true potential. The pitching in the system has definitely taken a step in the right direction. Exciting to see!!

One unearned run in 6-innings is just the latest strong effort.

Groome's K/BB/GB rates are all in the ballpark of the Eastern League average. His stuff superficially looks fringey for an MLB starter in 2022 to me. I think he's going to need to improve by a lot to be useful in the majors. People smarter than me can argue if he's a good or bad candidate to take a step forward in the next year or two.

Worcester lineup tweet has Keller getting the start, not Bello. But a separate tweet has Bello. Probably just a mistake to not include Bello in the lineup tweet, but something to keep an eye on.

Also to monitor, Downs did not play on Sunday and he’s not in the lineup tonight either. He was removed from Saturday’s game with side discomfort, so hopefully this doesn’t linger too long.

Lopez smoked a line drive but was out after a great play by the 1B. Brainer, Hickey and Kavadas drew walks. Who is this bum on the mound anyway

As of this moment the Sox full-season organizations are undefeated and outscoring their opponents today by a combined 40-5. I bet you'd have to go back quite a ways to find a more dominant performance by the organization as a whole.

Speier with a great tidbit - After two starts, Bello is the only International League pitcher with multiple 10K games this season.

Counterpoint: a lot of ppl with ok stuff pitch well in AA. 89-93 with average secondaries isn’t exactly eye-catching. Maybe his size allows the fastball to play up a tick but if the curveball never returns to its former plus self then it’s gonna be hard for him to make it. It’s not impossible but there will be very little margin for error in the bigs for him

I'm of the opinion that Groome doesn't get credit for getting guys out and preventing runners from scoring, when that's his only job. In his last start, he threw 6 shutout innings and worked out of several jams but he only struck out one guy, so were they actually six not-so-great shutout innings? Three of his six starts thus far this season resulted in game scores of 65+, while only two of Murphy's eight starts have scored as high. You could say that those are only results, and you'd be right. And unless Murphy has grown at least a couple inches and put on at least a couple stone since he was last measured, he's probably too small to be in a big-league rotation. But his stuff might play in relief.

I also believe that Groome has faced more than his share of adversity in his still young life, including a 45-month stretch in which he pitched only 4 innings in actual games, and I still think of him as a work in progress. He's still barely a year removed from that unforeseen break. Noah Song last pitched 33 months ago, with no TJ to recover from, and I'd bet money that the Navy has kept him in good shape and I'd also bet money that he gets a lot more benefit of the doubt from scouts on his road back.

That's my opinion of Jay Groome and I'll pull for him even if scouts say his stuff is not as good as his results and he's a Henry Owens comp (I'll be pulling for Murphy and Song too, of course, because I'm a Sox fan who follows Sox prospects; I'm not a fan who follows national prospect lists or a scout who doesn't care about laundry). Still, I have to wonder why the FO put Groome on the 40-man. They should be able to see that he won't be able to get big-leaguers out and they should probably let him be some other club's fool's gold.