Star pitchers go to big markets, its not all on the park, its about money. It does get into a pitchers head thou when they struggle in certain places thou.

I'm hoping Homer is starting to get it and its not just another teaser with him. He is having a career year and has solid for us. Pitching really not are problem for once its all the holes in the lineup thats biting us in the rear. Bray's not to impressive this year as well as Arrendondo a lot of the time, but other than that hard to find much to complain about pitching wise.

A 97 MPH fastball isn't all that impressive if he can't locate the pitch. Even Aroldis had trouble when he started serving up his fastball down the middle of the plate. I agree that the difference between pitching in GABP and other parks is mostly mental but that's always been Homer's achilles heel and we've heard for years that he's a "potential ace". I know his last game is fresh in your mind but we should'nt forget that it was against the Dodger B team and and Mike Leake and his 89 MPH fastball only gave up 2 earned runs as well. And speaking of Mike Leake, he's been over a full run better in ERA in his last 10 starts than Homer and while everyone likes to tout Homer's road performance Mike Leake's ERA on the road is only .15 (3.11) worse than Homer's.

great post

It happens every once in a while

Baker is under a lot of pressure in this contract year. He'll come around once we get him signed to his new contract.

HB has had 3 bad outings the entire year amongst the 14-15 starts....2 against the Brewers and 1 against the cards, first inning of game 1. Every other start outside of the Twins start was a very good start and definitely a QS...If you look around the league and minus out 4-5 pitchers you'll see so many lousy starts by big-name quality pitchers it's not even funny.....
If you want to label him what his projection was (whatever that means anymore) as a #1 then he'll always be a failure in people's minds but if you want to look at reality you'll see a ML starting pitcher who is presently a middle of the rotation guy. That's pretty good. I'll admit that HB still lives on "glimpses" in many minds and one of those glimpses was what we saw the other night in hitting 96-97 MPH in the 8th inning with 3 other quality pitches..
Fact remains that over 40% of 1st round picks never hardly get a cup of coffee in the BIGS and that number is even higher for pitchers.......HB needed a huuuuuuuuuuge check-up from the neck up in maturity and ego-dressing..He's showing excellent signs of tempering that....

maybe dusty is just too shaken up from his recent encounter with the devil.

In regards to Bailey's victory over LA, the Dodgers are not much more than a AAA minor league lineup without Kemp and Ethier.

you did notice that the ace of the reds staff and the other guy who's loved far more than HB both took losses, I presume ?......It's also the same Dodger team that put up 8 runs on sunday night against a pretty good Mets pitcher...

If Stubbs can't hit ahead of Votto where on earth can he hit, scouts are seeing the same thing as everyone else, that Stubbs can't locate pitches and swings at junk. That being said Stubbs is the greatest scoring threat if he can just get on base.

My thinking is that the Giants, Dodgers, and Padres have pretty big outfields, and Dusty doesn't want Heisey out there since he's not a true center fielder, Heisey is servicable at GABP though.

So, who do you pencil in batting 2nd? In an ideal world, you gotta go with Cozart. but as circumstance dictates he's batting lead-off. So, who bats lead-off, you see the situation that Dusty is in? It's easy to complain about a situation, but you don't give any insite on how to correct the problem, unless you were being serious about Hanigan batting 2nd?

as far as the OT of the Reds pitching staff... breaking the modern day record of consecutive starts by a 5 man rotation seems remarkable to me. It seemed like last season the Reds 5th starter was a revolving door.

It seems like the west coast swing is bringing out fans true colors, the Reds are in 2nd place, you'd think they hadn't won a game yet.

-Kef

It's not that I think Homer is a worthless pitcher, or that I hold him to the standard of ace or bust. I see it as a missed opportunity. I saw him pitch in Columbus for the Bats before he got called up for the first time and I just didn't see a guy that had the look of an ace, despite so many Reds fans grumbling that "he had nothing more to learn in AAA". Now I understand that is just my opinion based on what I saw that day but at that time he was a top 5 baseball prospect so we could have traded him for anyone we wanted. How would have the last four years played out for the Reds if they had a good table setter/lead off man for those years? In that context I think the Reds would have been a better team the last few years with a guy that has a .350 OBP instead of a middle of the rotation starter at best.

"I feel like you are not big fan of Homer..I'm guessing your sort of fed up with him and ready to throw in the towel"

Yes, I fully admit to that. Also, we can't just start throwing out games because we could do that with any pitcher. If you throw out Homer's bad Milwaukee game then I could throw out Leake's bad outing against Washington and we're back where we started this discussion.

Your give me ONE GAME as evidence of the Dodgers offensive prowess without Kemp and Ethier??

The Dodgers are 6-14 in their last 20 games, which means before facing us they were 4-13 (.235) and were shutout SIX times in their previous seventeen games.Even including their series with us they have scored 46 runs in 20 games or 2.3 runs/game for more than a three week stretch. Is it any wonder they blew a six game lead? And before the last two days, they were TRAILING the SF Giants by 1 1/2 games, which means that they had lost 7 1/2 games in the standings prior to Tuesdays game with us..... We went up against dead horse and couldn't beat it. Not very encouraging at this point of the season.

I just told you in my post the sunday night game against the Mets right before reds came into town.............Read bro...

Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, California
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 R H E
NYM
(43-37) 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 5 3
LAD
(44-36) 1 0 0 0 2 1 4 0 x 8 10 2
Stats
W: C. Kershaw
6-4 | 2.65
L: D. Gee
5-7 | 4.34

i don't think we're gonna see Stubbs struggle much longer