Red Sox pitcher Charlie Zink is a rarity among pitchers: a 24-year-old knuckleballer. As a traditional pitcher in the Sally League, Zink put up a 1.68 ERA in relief in 2002 before the big club converted him to a full-time knuckleball pitcher. Zink posted a 3.90 ERA in High-A last year before improving on that with a 3.43 ERA in 39 innings at AA. This year, he cracked BP’s Top 50 Prospects list. We sat down with Zink last week before a road game against the New Britain Rock Cats, and asked him about life as one of baseball’s rarest breeds.
Adam Dunn is O.P.T. draw 162 walks on the season, which would be the fourth-highest total of all-time.
Dunn, who’s abusing the ball to the tune of .271/.457/.564 and is tied for third in the NL with a .348 EqA, has often been criticized for being too patient at the plate. It’s possible there’s merit to that idea, but he’s knocking the snot out of the ball and he has more unintentional/quasi-unintentional walks than Barry Bonds. If he keeps this up, comparisons to a mid-’90s Frank Thomas won’t be off base.
Leave it to Randy Johnson to ruin a perfectly good trivia question. At the
end of my previous article on “Hidden
Perfect Games,” I included a trivia question on the remaining pitcher who
tossed two perfect games (hidden or not), having already named Pedro Martinez and Tom Browning. In the meantime, Randy Johnson threw an “official” perfect game on May 18th, to go along
with a hidden perfect game in 1998, to add his name to list of those attaining multiple perfection.
In response to the original question, many people sent in their guesses…
Here’s a nod to Buck Showalter, who moved Hank Blalock
down to sixth in the lineup last night against Scott
Schoeneweis, after batting him second against everyone for the entire
season (and most of ’03). Blalock has improved slightly against left-handers,
enough to warrant his continued playing time against them, but not enough to
justify batting him second. Moving him down in the lineup acknowledges the
team’s need to score runs while allowing Blalock to keep getting reps against
southpaws.
More teams should find this middle ground, rather than either stubbornly
batting guys who can’t hit one side in the same lineup spot all the time, or
giving up and sticking them into a platoon.