Blangraphs

Cliff Lee is on the 15 disabled list wish a strained oblique. They say he will hopefully miss only a couple starts- but who knows. As a reference point, our hero Joe Blanton suffered an oblique strain two years ago and missed the first month of the season. Cliff is being replaced by BG tolerable Kyle Kendrick. We could spend hours explaining why Kendrick sucks compared to Lee but needless to say he walks twice as many batters as Lee and he strikes out half as many.

Well this sucks.

Let's look on the bright side! Another Joe gets a shot.
To replace Lee, BG favorite Joe Savery gets the call to go the pen.
Savery was drafted out of Rice to much fanfare awhile ago, he was a starting pitcher/first baseman in college but was told to just focus on pitching when he became a part of the Phils organization. Skipping over his minor league career we'll just say he pretty much sucked most of the time, so much so that he was told to try being a first baseman again. He crushed. But as an "old", only "good" first baseman he appeared to have no future in the organization. Then he went LOOGY. That is to say he went to the bullpen and now pitches exclusively to left handed batters, quite effectively.

My problem with LOOGY's is that you basically eat up  a roster spot just so that you can retire one or two batters a game. Savery, however, can still hit. He is what we were hoping the Dtrain could be for us at the beginning of spring training. Someone you can bring in to pitch (or hit!) and still stay in for at least part of the next half inning. Ever since Joltin' Joe DaBlantio's World Series blast in 2008 we've had a sweet spot for pitchers knocking the cover off the ball, so hopefully we can see Charlie utilize Savery's bat on his already lefty heavy bench.