Jake

This guy's breaking ball is pretty damn tough on the lefties.

I try to counterbalance the rampant negativity in the game threads when I can

Time to get on the Giolito hype train folks

Leury shouldn't be batting leadoff but he's not some horrible player. On most days he's one of our best 9 and his flaws aren't the kick-in-the-nuts type.

When you put a really terrible defense out there, it's the one thing you can do to actively harm your young pitchers. I don't see a compelling enough reason to keep running Palka out there given how detrimental it is to the defense. I'm thinking and hoping Palka goes to AAA once Jay is back and we have to add Santana to the 25-man.

Yikes, he screwed him inside and then low

I see Tim as a glove-first 2 WAR type guy that you need a few of to be a consistent winner. As far as Eloy is concerned on D, what I see is a dumb error, him looking really slow, but also comfortable reading the ball in the air.

Got Abreu with the old straightball

You either ride with us or you get run over son!

Wow

FWIW, Statcast gives the Soler double an expected batting average of .230. Just placed it perfectly and didn't hit it super hard

Fry made one mistake and got punished for it but looked pretty nasty otherwise.

I don't see any reason to be down on Jace Fry this year vs the usual "you never know about relievers" kind of thing. He has good stuff and was nails last year.

Bullpen likely to be better than the rotation in that rotation is probably going to be very close to the worst while bullpen will be merely bottom half of the league, bottom third-ish

I'm not sure if Jones is going to be on the team by next week

Was just about to say you could do a lot worse things than walk Merrifield

I have zero faith in Jones

Burr looked a hell of a lot like Nate Jones there

Hamilton having a day

Alright folks, we're 1 swing away from optimism mode

Abreu at bats are still appointment TV

Since about game 3 of spring training, Yoan has looked like an absolute star.

We know Lopez has had a lot of velocity fluctuation before and I'll also add that the average pitcher gains about 1mph over the course of the season with the lowest velo at the beginning of the year and a peak around July. Speaking from memory of my project in a graduate statistics course

I'm reminded of the weird velocity fluctuations Lopez had at the beginning of the season last year:

Looking at Lopez's arm action the last few pitches I'll be interested to hear about the status of his elbow postgame