Addenda and knuckleballers

First off, some notes on previous topics...

1. While I hold out some hope that this post will see a reduction of the typos that have plagued previous entries, the realist in me knows that I won't be proofreading it. If you want some fun, go back and read the entry "Husidic" - can you make any sense of the paragraph wherein I use 'draw' (meaning "tie game") and 'draw' (meaning attraction) interchangably? I can't make heads or tails of it, and I wrote the durn thing.

2. One of the initial entries was on whether or not Carlos Lee was a "Cub Killer." I rather disingenuously claimed that this was an original thought of mine. Of course, it wasn't. Even Ron Santo, who has trouble detecting the obvious, knows that Carlos Lee hits like Babe Ruth at Wrigley Field. So sorry that I would have theoretically wasted of a hypothetical reader.

Second, the fate of Charlie Haegar, baseball's great knuckleballing hope...

Late Monday night, the Dodgers acquired Jim Thome and Jon Garland in exchange for a couple minor leaguers. The theory behind the acquisition of Garland is that he will become the team's fifth starter, replacing Charlie Haeger. Haeger throws a knuckleball, that most wondrous of pitches, and had made three starts in the role after a very good season at Albuquerque. What does Garland offer that Haeger does not? Here are three possible ideas...

1. Garland is older. The Dodgers rely on a relatively large group of young players (Ethier, Kemp, Kershaw, Billingsley, etc.) and somebody probably has to keep a gun to Joe Torre's temple so that he keeps playing those guys. It makes perfect sense that Joe Torre would have more faith in Garland's guaranteed mediocrity than taking a chance on a guy like Charlie Haeger, who hasn't been particularly successful in his limited big league opportunities. Torre, as he descends into crotchety old age, is a fairly risk-averse manager, a fact compounded by...

2. The fact that Haeger relies on a knuckleball. When the knuckler doesn't work, when it spins, it's basically a little-league caliber fastball. And major league hitters will absolutely crush it. When a knuckleball pitcher has a bad outing and throws a fair number of spinners the results are often ugly, as they were in Haeger's last start on August 29th. If a player has a glaringly obvious flaw, a risk-averse manager such as Torre is more likely to focus on that flaw rather than simply being accepting the trade-off with said player's virtues. If the Dodgers had a player like Russ Branyan or Adam Dunn, Torre would probably tear the remaining hair from his head rather than simply being patient with the strikeouts in the knowledge that there will be home runs too. In other words, he won't simply accept that a guy like Haegar will occasionally have an off-day but, terrified by the sight of crushed spinning knuckleballs, will implore his GM to trade for proven mediocrity instead.

3. The Dodgers, being a wealthy big-market team, don't have to rely on an unproven commodity like Charlie Haegar. In a sense, they go and acquire the veteran simply because they can. This has been the Yankees mantra throughout the Steinbrenner era, although that team's biggest recent successes have been due to the fact that Brian Cashman knows how to build from within.

For his sake, I hope Haegar can catch on with a bad team at some point soon. If he can get through an entire season in a big-league rotation, we fans will get the pleasure of watching him throw his knuckleball for another 15 years. In a full season, Haegar could quite plausibly put up an ERA of 4.5 to 5 and throw over 200 innings. That performance would have tremendous value to a lousy team, the kind of club that constantly cycles through lousy starters (KC, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati...I'm looking in your direction). For that to happen, he'll need a manager with an unusual degree of patience because there will be inevitable moments when the knuckleball spins and the batter hits blasts it toward South America. If his manager and GM can fight off the knee-jerk impulse to send the pitcher back to AAA, they'll hopefully realize that the benefits of having a guy like Haeger greatly outweigh the momentary embarrassment.

And as a baseball fan, I root for a successful knuckleball pitcher to emerge because it's just so much fun to watch big league hitters flail at 70 MPH garbage.