Monday, September 8, 2008

We get stacks and stacks of letters

On a morning where there is no last-night's-game to speak of, we decided to open the old mailbag and parse through the piles of questioneers seeking our wisdom.

(Hey man, if Griff, Bastian and Stoeten can have their mailbags, then we want ours too.)

Let's get it on...

Neil S. from metro New York writes: How about a little push for some Cy Young talk for Scott Downs. I know that's not logical but I feel so comfortable with him on the hill even when he gets in trouble.
I really enjoy your site.

Neil: We're glad you really enjoy our site. In fact, we barely even care about the Blue Jays success anymore. We just go through our daily visits and stats and sit back and ponder whether if we could make a living off of this. And while we're sure that acolytes like you would be more than willing to contribute vast sums of money through exorbitant subscription fees to keep us in the style of living to which we have become accustomed (those Burberry toilet paper cozies aren't free, yo), we know that the love from the people is enough to keep us going.

All this to say: Can we crash at your place when we visit metro New York?

Oh, and as far as Scott Downs is concerned: He was one of our main concerns coming into the season. We looked at his 2.17 ERA and 1.22 WHIP and figured that there was no way that he could match those numbers. Little did we know that he was about to shave almost a full run off of the ERA (1.19 to this point) and .15 off the WHIP.

We noted before that the one thing that will hold Scott Downs back from consideration as an elite pitcher is the lowish K rate (57 in 68 innings) and the highish walk rate (25 so far). Neither of those numbers are bad...but they are just not exceptional enough for Cy Young voters to take notice, especially since Downs is a middle reliever.

The argument from the idiot Cy voters might be that if Downs was so good, he'd be the closer, but then again, their argument a few years back seemed to be that Big Fat Bartolo Colon deserved the Cy because he got more wins than Johan Santana, even though Santana killed him in every other relevant category.

Hey Kids! Want to see your email cut and pasted into the Tao of Stieb? Want us to completely ignore your question? Would you rather have a real manly man answer your Blue Jays questions rather than the other pantywaisted nancyboys' mailbags? Do you want to flatter us and tell us how awesome we are? Have at it! Write us at taoofstieb at gmail dot com and you can become our best blog friend forever. If your letter is selected, we'll send you a Tao of Stieb t-shirt. Maybe.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Tao,

I just wanted to write in and say how amazing the weekend coverage has been lately. Give that boy a raise, and me a t-shirt.

signed,
someone other than the Ack.

Tao of Stieb said...

No question, the Ack is good.

Maybe too good...

Anonymous said...

solid mailbag

can you try to shorten it a bit next time? i only have an hour for lunch

The Ack said...

was that comment too transparent? I feel like maybe it was a little too transparent.

Tao, what size is that Al Oliver t-shirt you bought? Maybe you can just send me that instead.

Tao of Stieb said...

Alas, Mrs. Tao exercised veto power over the Al Oliver t-shirt. It's probably still hanging on the rack of a store in Montreal.

Darren Priest said...

I have to agree with Dilly. Your post title suggested the pithy responses of Letterman, but you print one letter and go all Sam Pepys on the guy.

Get thee to an editor!