jmell44

Have you ever noticed Albert's home run trot is the same speed as his baserunning? 

MS pulling Shoe was premature and weak but didn't affect the outcome of the game.  
Dale Scott was terrible.  Is terrible.  I only watched a few innings, but one thing I will say is that Wieters is a horrible framer.  Just terrible and it's almost like it worked in his favor tonight.  It's almost like he was making Scott guess on a ton of pitches.  
Interestingly, vs. LHers, Scott wasn't too bad.  One strike called a ball.  One ball called a strike.  Two borderline pitches (one for each team) called balls
vs. RHers, however, he was awful at recognizing balls and strikes for Bmore.  Baltimore had 5 balls out of the zone called strikes and another 3 in the zone called balls.  Angels had one ball called a strike and two borderline strikes called balls.  Bmore also had a bunch of borderline pitches called balls.  So overall, Scott was bad but it kinda evened out even though his timing for the bad wasn't optimal.  
Joe Smith isn't a closer, but it's closest thing we have to one unless Bedrosian can keeps up his dominance, but there is no one else on this team that deserved to be the closer other than Smith at the time Street went down.  It's a consequence of not having someone else who can consistently dominate for an inning.  The pen has done much better than expected and better than they should.  It makes we think I am wrong about them or they are going to come crashing down hard.  Being over worked shouldn't really come into play until late in the year so I am not buying that as an excuse.  I applaud their efforts so far, but they lack talent.  
At the end of the day, your cleanup hitter is hitting .222 with a .695 ops.  What do you expect.  I don't care what the guys name is or what he's being paid, you put a guy like that in that spot and you are gonna see games where he leaves 7 guys stranded.  He's not good enough to bat there but who goes there instead?  If you put Kole there and bat Albert 5th, who do you put in the 2 or 3 spot?  Cron?  The rest are actually statistically worse options.  It's something that we have to live with right now unfortunately because not only is there no one else, but there is no one else with the potential to be better.  
But yes, it's Albert's fault for this game, but in the grand scheme, it's Arte's fault.