Browns Football is Back…For Now
April 26, 2011NFL Draft: Browns Roundtable, Part II
April 26, 2011When Mitch Talbot’s injury was made public, a week or so after the inciting incident, I was not in a particularly good mood. I felt that the team had intentionally misled reporters and lied to fans.
Perhaps I shouldn’t get so worked up about things like these—things that don’t really matter much in the larger context. A mature person would have taken the team’s deception in stride, realizing that more important things are happening in the world these days than a silly baseball team and their guarded relationship with the press. Yes. That’s what a mature person would do.
This is the part of the story where you find out that I am not a mature person. Rather than moving on, I continued my little rant. When Columbus announced that David Huff would be taking Jeanmar Gomez’s turn in the rotation (so that Gomez would be ready to replace Talbot in the rotation), I decided to make what was probably mean-spirited comment.
Here’s the twitter feed:
Now you may remember that last season David Huff got himself in some trouble when he tweeted about being called up before the team announced it. The team was so mad that they reneged on the deal and decided to call up Josh Tomlin instead. The rest, as they say, is history. David Huff has not pitched in a Major League game since.
I imagine this might be a touchy subject. I also, if you will recall, am not mature.
Luckily, David seemed to take it well. At least I think that’s what this means:
Now that I think about it, maybe he didn’t take it all that well? Either way, it made me chuckle, and immediately put me in a better mood about the whole Talbot-deception.
Which, I must say, is the first time in quite a while that David Huff has put me in a good mood. To say the least, he’s had a rough stretch on the North Coast. His career ERA is 5.84. He has struck out fewer than 4.5 batters per nine and walked more than three. As I’ve written several times, he doesn’t do anything particularly well, and that’s not a recipe for success at the big league level. That’s not a recipe for success anywhere, I wouldn’t imagine.
On the other hand, I’ve always had a soft-spot for David Huff. And though I’m not particularly proud of this fact, I have on more than one occasion compared his potential to that of a young Cliff Lee. That comparison is obviously nonsense, but David Huff doesn’t have to be a terrible pitcher. He can throw 93 mph as a left handed pitcher. He has three decent pitches. He has had some intermittent success, and appears to be an adjustment or three away from putting it all together. I still believe this can happen. I really do.
But if it weren’t for Carlos Carrasco’s “tight elbow”, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be writing about David Huff’s potential again. I’m pretty sure that David Huff knows this too.
Last Chance, Davey.
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AP Photo/Amy Sancetta
9 Comments
I really want the kid to turn things around, but it’s tough to look past back-to-back seasons of negative WAR.
Huff was a star in Akron in 2008. That was my first summer working for the team, and he was 5-1 with a 1.92 ERA in 11 games before his very well-deserved promotion to Buffalo. He had 62 strikeouts against 14 walks in 65.2 innings. His WHIP was 0.883. He even pitched a complete game shutout, a rarity for the Double-A Eastern League. So I’m deep down a Huff fan too, and I’ll be hopelessly waiting for him to emulate some of the MLB success of that Traber/Tallet/Lee trio that was in Akron back in 2002: http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/team.cgi?id=75c6f576.
Huff? Huff? Pass.
/Sorry
Maybe if we continue to mock and ridicule him, he will get angry and win a Cy Young award like Cliff Lee 😀
All joking aside though, Im rooting for the guy, we’re probably going to need him pretty soon. Unless Alex White is ready.
i miss billy traber
No idea why you are even remotely upset about the Talbot situation. The Indians see absolutely no benefit to giving away all the details of a player’s injury. And it took all of three days for this information to be completely known, and that’s assuming that they knew all the exact details right away. Carrasco got pulled Sunday afternoon, its going to be 72 hours before you know exactly what is wrong with him, why aren’t you bitching about that too?
@ Steve:
I have no problem with them witholding information; I expect it really. But when asked directly by a reporter if Mitch Talbot is injured, and they respond, “No. He’s fine.”? I guess that bothers me on a moral level–it’s such an obvious lie that they don’t even bother hiding it. Why not say “no comment”?
I don’t have any issue with the way they’ve handled Carrasco’s injury (yet). When he left the game, they didn’t say, “Oh, he’s fine. He just wanted to watch a Nascar race on the clubhouse TV, so we decided to pull him from the game.” They said he had an elbow injury. That seemed less dishonest to me. Make sense?
When asked, Manny Acta didn’t say “No. He’s fine.” He said “Talbot is a guy who spent some time on the DL . . . We just wanted to push him back two days, give him two extra days of rest.” That’s not a lie. Chances are pretty good that the situation was like Carrasco’s. The pitcher noticed something, and the Indians are testing the elbow and providing treatment and it takes a couple days to really evaluate the extent of the injury.
@ Steve:
http://twitter.com/#!/CaminoTribe/status/60145602905907200
This is from an Indians beat reporter, in response to the question, “Did Manny Acta say that Mitch Talbot was fine?”
Those are quotation marks around the word “Yeah”. That’s a lie, right?