I am vindicated!
Miguel Olivo has been sent down to AAA Tacoma. And there was much rejoicing.
After my post a while ago that pointed out Olivo’s shortcomings as an everyday catcher, Friend (who likes cheese)’s husband (who doesn’t wear socks), who I will now call Doc (he has a Ph.D) and I had a lively debate over batting averages and what they really mean after he read the blog. However, he has a fantasy baseball team and Olivo was on it, so he was rather – ahem – sensitive to the issue.
With nearly 2 months of the baseball season gone, Olivo is batting a pathetically anemic .145, after spending most of those 2 months as the starting catcher. While Doc didn’t necessarily argue with me about Olivo’s defensive skills (as in not-up-to-Dan-Wilson-standards), he really thought that the batting average would improve.
With Wilson gone for the season with a torn ACL in his knee (and we pray he can come back next year), and Wiki Gonzalez (who came up from AAA when Wilson went down) on the 15 day disabled list, the M’s obtained a name from the past – Pat Borders. He is a player’s player. He is great. He is 42 YEARS OLD!!! How many 42 year olds are catching?? I mean, Moyer’s in his 40’s, but he’s in a 5 man rotation! Borders has guts, and now he’s got the job. He’s a veteran in the truest sense of the word. And now we also get to see AA San Antonio prospect Rene Rivera (.292 batting average in AA with 2 homers and 11 RBIs) since we need 2 catchers to trade off.
Hopefully Wiki will heal up his hamstring and get playing again, but now it’s Borders’ turn to shine. He deserves it. But it’s times like this that make me lament the day we traded Jason Varitek without giving him a shot in the majors. And who knew Derek Lowe would turn out to be not-quite-that-crappy? Oh, well, that’s baseball – and a lament for another day.
Olivo needs to get his head screwed back on straight. He’s overthinking – apparently he’s spending time every day in the batting cages. He needs to relax. He’s got to spend some time in AAA getting back into the form we were promised when he came from the White Sox. But I have this gut feeling that he’s been overrated all along, and he might not make it back this year. Sorry, Doc, but I’ve been proved right once. Don’t make me do it again.
And right now, we have a 3 game winning streak. Hopefully Hargrove can keep the guys in line and poor Ryan Franklin will get some frickin’ run support tonight.
Update: Okay, according to Friend, I’m in trouble, because Olivo is not on Doc’s fantasy baseball team. He apparently had issues with me taking Olivo to task so early in the season. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t right about Olivo being a lousy catcher, but I was under the mistaken impression that the reason Doc defended him was regarding his fantasy baseball team. Apologies to all. I’m going to have to make Doc a cake or something to make up for that.
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