Archive for Jack Hannahan

Breaking news out of Cincinnati: Joey Votto is awesome. He was awesome in each of his four full seasons leading up to 2012. He was awesome before he injured his knee last year, taking a ridiculous .354/.476/.639 line into the June 30 game in San Francisco that saw him leave after five innings due to the injury. He was a different kind of awesome in 25 September games after returning from surgery, failing to hit a homer but still managing to compile a .316/.505/.421 line. That’s not a typo; Votto had 105 September plate appearances, and despite being on the shelf for two months, he reached 57 times.

I’ll take your standard disclaimers about small sample size and varying September competition and I will reply with, simply, Joey Votto is awesome. That’s not to say he’s infallible, because there’s a conversation to be had about the fact that he never did hit another homer after taking Scott Diamond deep on June 24, which led to his somewhat disappointing total of 14 on the season. That’s fair, but his powerless September showed that he’s more than capable of being a very dangerous hitter even if he’s not going deep; that is, even if he never matches his career-high mark of 37 from 2010, he’s still going to be contributing in the other main offensive categories. It would sure be nice to see him showing some of that past power in the spring, now that he’s so much further from surgery, but at a first base position that is no longer as strong as it used to be, Votto belongs in an elite trio along with Albert Pujols & Prince Fielder. Read the rest of this entry »

Third base has just been a minefield of excrement recently. Yes, I said excrement.

Jose Bautista has a bum neck, Ryan Zimmerman is out for another 6 weeks, Alex Rodriguez is on again off again with a variety of ailments, Pablo Sandoval is gone for breaking the bone all baseball players should have surgically removed, and even David Freese got in on the act with a broken hand of his own. Howard did a nice job of griping about third base on Thursday so I won’t try to continue that particular rant. What I’d like to do is look at a couple of players that some of us have had to turn to as we wait for something better to come along.

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Like vultures picking every last piece of meat off a carcass in the hot desert sun, it’s time for us to take another look at the waiver wire and see what remaining pieces of fantasy value lie in the pool of unwanted free agents… Read the rest of this entry »