With September now underway, the Red Sox have called up five players to fill out the Major League roster. Called-up were Junichi Tazawa, Chris Woodward, Joey Gathright, Brian Anderson, and George Kottaras.
While Tazawa is the easy favorite to make an impact for the big league club, every stolen base and late inning defensive substitution will put the Sox that much closer to the playoffs.
Analysis inside...
In a homage to Twitter, the new social media application that is changing how news is delivered (in the same vein how blogs changed everything) I bring to you a summary of each Red Sox player on the 25-man roster in 140 characters or less (the maximum number of characters you can enter on Twitter).
Have Twitter? Follow me. Tim's on too. Oh, and Fire Brand has one as well. You'll notice that had you followed Fire Brand, you would have gotten all these tweets last night.
Luck hasn't been on his side, I will give him that. Penny has had to deal with a .326 BABIP, while surrendering line drives on only 18 percent of batted balls against. And his LOB percentage is at 66, which is far too low. Eventually, he should strand a few more base-runners.
But it is his love with the fastball, and the home run that is killing him. Do you know how often Penny throws the fastball? 73 percent of the time! This is the American League East, Brad. There has to be somewhat of a reliance on the breaking stuff too. Maybe he doesn't feel comfortable throwing it. And he doesn't always seem to have command of it. But his curveball has a "Pitch Type Value" of -15.4. That is horrendous.
Point is, he has no viable pitch outside of the fastball, and at times he even struggles with that. That is why he is so reliant on it. he simply cannot do anything positive with the breaking ball.