Category Archives: Charlie Haeger

All Sorts of Moves

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Talk about an active last 24 hours….

1) Travis Schlichting sent down, Charlie Haeger recalled. No surprise here, as we all knew Schlichting was gone as soon as he completed throwing four shutout innings in relief against Arizona on Wednesday. With the extra-inning games depleting the bullpen in the midst of a long stretch without a day off, you had to get a fresh arm up, and having a guy like Haeger makes sense.

Steve Dilbeck still hates it, though:

Almost sounds like they’re going to throw Haeger out there one last time to prove he cannot get it done. Somebody needs more evidence.

Haeger is a stand-up, competitive guy who would be the first to tell you he has pitched miserably. But he’s essentially a trick ball pitcher whose knuckleball hasn’t been tricky.

His time, I think, is running out.

…or maybe his rehab stint was coming to a close, and the Dodgers were forced to activate him or lose him, which is basically what Joe Torre said in that exact same article:

“We activated Haeger more out of necessity than really wanting to at this point,” Torre said. “I would feel a lot better if I was a little surer of his physical well-being, but after [Wednesday’s] game we’re kind of up against it.”

If the Dodgers were trying to “prove he cannot get it done”, wouldn’t you have just DFA’d him and brought up Jon Link? I can’t defend Haeger’s performance thus far, but if his foot injury was really a thing, he deserves a shot as the long man to see if he’s any better, especially in this time of bullpen need.

2) Josh Lindblom moves from the rotation to the bullpen. Chad is going to be thrilled, and I agree with him; Lindblom probably only has the stuff to be a mediocre starter, but he could be a solid reliever. It’s interesting what’s become of the ABQ starting rotation, though. Look what’s happened to the top five from the beginning of the year: McDonald (injured), Ely (promoted), Elbert (still there, but wild), Towers (released), and Lindblom (bullpen). There’s a few good relievers still there, but probably not a lot of help for the starting rotation unless we start getting into Seth Etherton and Tim Corcoran territory.

3) Jeff Weaver and Casey Blake move from the game to the bench. Weaver came into the game but left without throwing a pitch, thanks to a blister. Blake was scratched with back spasms. Neither seems serious.

4) James Loney moves… in exactly the same direction as always. Last winter in the Maple Street Press Dodgers Annual, I wrote that Loney’s 2009 was a season that “only a math major could love”, since he had exactly the same amount of plate appearances (651), homers (13), RBI (90), and steals (7) as he did in 2008. What’s he on pace for in 2010? 12 homers and 96 RBI. He’s like clockwork – though he does somehow already have 7 stolen bases, and I doubt he’s really going to hit his projected total of 21.

5) Manny Ramirez is moving… in completely the wrong direction. Since he returned from the disabled list on May 8, he’s hitting .188/.288/.304, with four extra base hits in almost a month. It’s starting to become worrisome. Everyone loves to yell “steroids!”, of course, but he’s also 38 years old. He’s a huge part of why the Dodger offense is struggling right now.

Tonight, Clayton Kershaw goes against Kenshin Kawakami, who’s having a pretty average season. His ERA is 4.66, his WHIP is 1.321, neither of which are great, but not terrible either. Yet his record is somehow 0-7. Prediction: he goes 6.1 innings, allowing 2 hits and a run.

You Can’t Win Em All…

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…but you especially can’t win any when Garret Anderson is batting second in the lineup. I get that he has to get a start every now and then if he’s going to be here, and circumstances don’t get much more favorable than against a junkballer righty in Coors Field. But hitting him second? Well, why wouldn’t you want to make sure that he gets more at-bats then Kemp and Manny? Predictably, he struck out twice without getting a hit.

It’s time for the Steve Dilbeck response lightning round!

1) No, I’m not worried about Hiroki Kuroda. Not yet. He was so solid to start the season – and really, whenever he’s been healthy since arriving in LA – that I won’t panic over a few lesser starts. Especially not when this one was in Colorado, where he’s never been successful.

2) I get questioning the Charlie Haeger decision, but not for the same reasons. Joe Torre’s insistence that John Ely needs an extra day of rest means that you’re using the 5th starter sooner than you need to, regardless of who that is. I haven’t seen anything in Ely that suggests he’s tiring already, so shouldn’t the goal here be to use offdays to minimize the use of starter #5 until Vicente Padilla returns in a few weeks?

As for Haeger himself, you know I’ve always been a big fan, though I do wonder why they’re showing him such dedication this year when he hasn’t been great after not giving him any rope last year when he was killing it. So I’m happy to see him get a shot on the off-chance his foot “injury” was legit, because this team still badly needs a viable starter option out of then pen when Padilla returns, and as nicely as Carlos Monasterios filled in, I’m not sure I’m ready to put that on him yet.

That said, I do wonder if Haeger isn’t being set up to fail. Who brings an injured pitcher off the DL to start on TWO days rest?

******

Ugly outing by Scott Elbert last night. Then again, he couldn’t get the ball over the plate in AAA, so I’m not sure what made anyone think that’d magically change in Coors Field. I bet he doesn’t get a chance to redeem himself before getting shipped out, and we don’t see him again until September.

******

I’ve seen some suggestions that the Dodgers ought to go after Dontrelle Willis, who clearly could use a change of scenery after getting DFA’d by Detroit. He hasn’t shown anything in about three years, so I can’t really see the interest. That said, the AAA rotation has Tim Corcoran & Seth Etherton in it (plus whomever is temporarily filling in with Elbert in the bigs and James McDonald on the DL), so it’s not like giving him a crack would bump anyone important. If he really wanted to try to make it back home to California, and was willing to sign a minor-league deal at the minimum, I don’t see the harm. I’d just consider it extremely unlikely.

Now Taking Applications…

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In my frustration over the horrendous yet predictable outing by Ramon Ortiz last night, I said that I didn’t know who should start the next time around, but that it couldn’t be him. That’s a little unfair of me; if I’m going to say there’s a problem, I should at least offer a solution, right? Well, in the comments of that post, I got to discussing alternatives to Ortiz and… well, it’s ugly.

First, the good news.  The next time the 5th starter spot comes up again is Monday, which is conveniently an offday. So long as Joe Torre doesn’t do something stupid like push everyone back a day and just lets the Ortiz spot be skipped, we can avoid the issue for another turn through the rotation. The bad news is, that spot would next come up on May 29th, in Colorado of all places. So not only is no one beating down the door to get the job, it’s in the worst possible location. You’d think that with well-regarded prospects like James McDonald, Scott Elbert, and Josh Lindblom in AAA, at least one would be worthy of the job, but a quick look at their recent appearances says otherwise.  Granted, ABQ is a hitter’s park, but that’s not enough to excuse numbers so ugly that McDonald’s 5.77 ERA is the best of the top four starters.

McDonald did throw five scoreless in the outing before this. But damn, these trends are not going in the right direction.

Elbert’s done a better job at keeping runs off the board, for sure… but look at the walk numbers and tell me that’s not terrifying. On the season he’s walked 28 batters in 32.1 innings. No wonder he’s not getting past five innings.

Lindblom’s interesting, because while his season stats look lousy (6.05 ERA), he’s got a nice 39/14 K/BB ratio. That said, he’s coming off two lousy starts himself (including walking six in four innings), so it’s not like he’s forcing the Dodgers’ hand here.


Ha! And to think I was worried about him getting a callup when I saw the team in New York. What an absolute disaster he’s been; if anything, he should be worried about sticking with the Isotopes, much less making it to the bigs.

The remaining starts in ABQ were split between John Ely, who we already know all about, and Tim Corcoran, who hasn’t been in the bigs since 2007 and has made just three starts in AAA. So there’s no help coming from there, and there’s no one in AA worth calling up (sidenote: all spring, I had my “NRI invite list” on the sidebar, and I’d cross names out as they got cut or shipped out. I could never figure out what happened to John Koronka, who I disliked even the non-roster signing of, and then never heard from again. At the time, I wrote, “Man, he sounds unqualified to even try out for the Isotopes.” So what happened to him? He’s in AA ball, allowing a 1.500 WHIP. It’s time to find a new career, I think.)

Granted: the start is still over a week away, so it’s possible that McDonald, Elbert, or Lindblom rip off a nice start or two and get back in the team’s good graces. Possible, but extremely unlikely, so help isn’t going to be coming from AAA.

That being the case, you’re left with two options. First, there’s Charlie Haeger, who will be nearing the end of his rehab stint by then. He’s been good but not great in his two starts for Inland Empire, and it seems that his “injury” has healed. That said, even I’m not dying to see him back in the rotation, and especially not in Coors Field.

So there’s only one right answer here, and it’s the answer Joe Torre dreads the most. You have to start Carlos Monasterios. The Rule 5 pick has been surprisingly effective as the team’s longman, not allowing more than one earned run in any of his twelve appearances. With the bullpen rounding back into form and Jeff Weaver back, Monasterios’ role as a reliever has lessened, and he already showed he could survive as an emergency starter, allowing one run in four innings against Pittsburgh.

Does anyone really think that Ortiz can outperform Monasterios right now? Of course not. With the limited options, it’s the only right choice – and then what you do is DFA Ortiz as soon as Haeger’s rehab stint is up, pushing Haeger to the bullpen and perhaps using him as a tag-team partner assuming that Monasterios won’t go deep into the games.

Rules? We Don’t Need No Stinking Rules

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We’ve all been theorizing for some time now that the Dodgers would do their best to circumvent the “you can’t recall a player you optioned to the minors for 10 days rule” by inventing some sort of injury to a poorly-performing pitcher, in order to recall John Ely to start in Arizona on Tuesday. There’s really no other way around it; it’s the only viable option.

Well, now it’s left the domain of bloggy conspiracy theories, as USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale has somewhat confirmed it:

The Dodgers have quietly decided to start John Ely, who was sent to the minors last week, on Tuesday against the D-backs.

Of course, Nightengale makes no mention of the corresponding roster move. Remember, though, you can break the “10 day” rule only in case of an injury, not because a roster spot opens up due to someone getting cut, optioned, or traded. So while you can speculate on who that’s going to be… we all know it’ll be Charlie Haeger, who miraculously came down with a “bruised heel” after getting precisely zero outs against the Rockies on Saturday. What fortuitous timing!

Seriously, I have to wonder. Even though it was obviously the right move for the Dodgers to do whatever they could to get Ely back up, how much more glaring does the rule-bending need to be before MLB notices?

*Dr. Nick joke brought to you by commenter EephusBlue, whose noble spirit has embiggened this blog.

Charlie Haeger’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

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Has there ever been a worse week of starting pitching in Dodger history? I’m not even sure how I’d go about researching something like that, but in the last week we’ve seen Clayton Kershaw not get out of the 2nd, Chad Billingsley allowing four runs in the 1st, Hiroki Kuroda allowing 14 baserunners in 5.1 IP, and then last night Charlie Haeger got as many Rockies out as I did – zero. If not for John Ely’s sparkling turn on Thursday, this trip through the rotation would have been a complete wash, and yet Ely was rewarded for that with a trip to AAA.

This team is in trouble, and they need to do something about it, now. After today’s game, I’ll be back with the moves that need to be made before the clock strikes midnight tonight, not only to get better players on the team but also to send a message that this kind of performance is just unacceptable. But feel free to post your own ideas in the comments first.