Fire Gardy

Remember a while back, when I started pointing out that Liriano needs to step up his game significantly, or else our options are limited to sending him either to the minors or to the bullpen? Well, it sure hasn’t looked like he’s stepped up his game, has it? And Gardy has had just about enough of Liriano’s crap, saying he’ll make his next start but not necessarily any more after that:

“I plan on him probably going out there and making his next start, but I’ll talk with [pitching coach Rick Anderson], and we’ll see where we’re at.

“The options are very limited, we can’t go with a four-man rotation. We just don’t have much starting pitching left. It’s not like we can say, ‘Take him out and put those other guys in.’ You start telling me who those other guys are, I’m sure some fans have some ideas, but they’re not on our ballclub.”

Some fans probably do have some ideas, but Gardy’s largely right — we don’t have anyone banging on the door of the rotation down in AAA, and without Slowey our rotation depth is pretty minimal. But I have an idea. Liriano to the bullpen, Duensing to the rotation. He’s really the only “viable” starter we have left right now.

But I want to take a gander at what exactly has changed since I called for Liriano to go to the bullpen back in late June. His ERA coming into his June 23 start was 5.91, and right now it’s sitting at 5.63 (event taking into account his last 2 starts, which were both unmitigated disasters). In the 7 starts since June 23, he has an ERA of 5.09, which while horrible is considerably better than the 6.08 ERA he had in the previous 7 starts, or the 5.75 ERA he had in his first 7 starts.

So basically, while I agree that something needs to be done about Liriano, and we can’t keep running him out there, and if he doesn’t start to put together some strong starts he’s got to be out of the rotation … I’m a little bit confused as to what Gardy’s reasoning is here. It’s not like he’s getting worse … in fact he’s (extremely slowly) getting better (though not enough). If you’re willing to consider removing him from the rotation, why do it after this set of 7 starts? Why not the first 7 which was really horrible, or the second 7, which was even worse, rather than the third 7, which was the best of the three? Are we making this decision based only on his last two starts, over which he gave up 10 runs in 10.1 IP, for an 8.71 ERA? That’s not even his worst two start stretch this season — that’s an honor that goes to his starts on May 20 and 25, during which he gave up 12 ER in 8 IP, for a 13.50 ERA — and were the beginning of a stretch of 3 games in which he only went 4 IP per game.* If you’re going to decide to remove someone from the rotation … wouldn’t that be a better place to start considering it than, you know, 10+ starts later?

* The third start of that stretch was Liriano’s nadir, when his season ERA ballooned to 6.60 … and from there it had gone down every time until July 20 when he started getting rocked again. Well, rocked still … but even worse.

And do you really trust Rick Anderson to make the right decision about Liriano? I was talking about this with my dad during last night’s game — Rick Anderson’s reputation may be completely undeserved. Was it not Cuellar working with our guys in the minors that honed their talent? Not Rick Anderson? And fine, the major league pitching coach doesn’t develop the young pitchers, he helps them make adjustments and tweak some things while their in the majors. Anderson’s a big sinkerball guy, which doesn’t explain the fact that any pitcher on our team that had any success did it with the changeup. And, the coup de grace — our pitching staff has gotten markedly worse every year since Radke retired.

So I’m going to go ahead and say it. From 2002-2006, our pitching coach — the guy who works with the young guys, helps them with a new grip on their changeup, and helps them make adjustments — was not Rick Anderson, but rather Brad Radke. From 2007-2009, the pitching coach actually was Rick Anderson. Anyone want to go out on a limb and say which guy did a better job?

Given that there’s no chance Rick Anderson gets fired, and there’s no chance Liriano improves … what do we do? My take, as mentioned, is to put Liriano into a 7th inning role, and move Duensing into his spot in the rotation. (And also kill Keppel and send Crain to the minors, replacing them with Delaney and Slama … and evaluate Morillo’s command to see if we can also replace Dickey and his collapsing knuckleball/meatball repertoire.)

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