The Futility Infielder

Seldom has a single player ruined an entire weekend for me the way Juan Acevedo did this past weekend. Not only did he blow what was potentially Roger Clemens' 300th win against the Cubs, but he also contributed heavily to their loss the next night via a throwing error and his usual craptacular pitching. Two New York papers reported yesterday that Acevedo would be gone by sundown, and sure enough he was. ERA at the time of release: 7.71. Adios!

Of course, in the department of Being Careful What You Wish For, when Antonio Osuna entered last night's ballgame against Houston I wrote "I don't care what happens from this point forward, I'm just glad Juan Acevedo is gone." Osuna's first pitch ended up about 400 feet away in Monument Park, prompting me and a few others in Game Chatter to wonder whether Acevedo was really gone ("I think Acevedo killed Osuna and put his body in the river. Now he's pretending he's Osuna," was the best guess). Still, it was only a solo shot, and the Yanks won the ballgame 5-3.

Meanwhile fairly hefty but interesting debate over Acevedo's "merits" sprung up over at Baseball Primer, with a few heavy-duty statheads singing "The Ballad of Small Sample Sizes" and "The Regression to the Mean Song" to us high-blood-pressured, myopic Yankee fans. Their main point was that Acevedo's been more or less average for the past three years and that sooner or later he'd return to being more or less average again, and that we shouldn't get all fahitched about 23 lousy innings. Meanwhile we Yank fans argued that it was senseless for the Yanks to waste their time waiting for Acevedo's performance to normalize when they had access to plenty of other relievers on the farm and in the free talent pool, including Jason Anderson and Al Reyes, both of whom they recalled after whacking Juan.

Larry Mahnken of the Replacement Level Yankee Weblog has done a better job summarizing some of the arguments that broke out on that thread, and he's got a few other interesting tidbits and smart-assed comments as well. If your'e a Yank fan, you should be reading him.