I loved Casey Kotchman coming up, he did a lot of things right, but he was trending in the right direction. Injuries had been his big question mark and just when it looked like he had turned the corner and was finally going to be healthy he was beaned sliding into second base.... Since then.. NOTHING.
I have no idea if there is any real connection, but the man has been in a steady regression since then. He should have been Mark Grace part 2, possiblty with a tad more power but it's just never happened. His pitch recognition has completely fallen apart which has resulted in a complete inability to load up on a pitch..
It's been sad to watch. Both he and Dallas McPherson should have been better. But where with Dallas we can point to the injuries and say they completely ruined his fledgling career with Casey there is that weird beaning and then a slow regression that really makes no sense.
Possibly the most bizarre thing is that Casey is a baseball lifer, most everything he used to do he had ben doing since age 5.. The man literally grew up on ballparks and lived, breathed, ate, baseball.
If you could look at the scouting videos of Casey in HS and compare them to the guy he is now, you wouldn't believe it's the same guy. Maybe, and this is a really good possibility, but maybe he wasnt that good, he was juust so very well coached that he had an edge on less experienced players and that just wasn't going to carry him once he got to MLB..
Kotch will always be the one guy I won't ever know what the hell happened to.. Outside of that shot he took off the temple sliding into 2B, it's hard to point to any one thing.
=== Mighty Casey, Dept. ===
The pinch-hit for Tuiasosopo was logical. No complaints there. The complaint arose on March 30, when Kotchman was installed as the fulltime 1B...
Most M's fans wuz optimistic about the 27-year-old Kotchman. You will tire soon, very soooon, sez SSI, of the two-bounce double plays ending rallies.
We didn't say the GIDPs would end a lot of games necessarily, but we trust you have tired of the in-rally worm burners anyway. Kotch has 6 GIDP's in 25% of a season, which neatly echoes his OPS bar chart (100 x 6).
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=== POTD ===
We think you'll derive some amusement from our two-part January POTD on Casey Kotchman.
SSI agreed with Zduriencik on 22.5 of his 25 players, disagreeing on 2.5 of them:
- Casey Kotchman
- Ian Snell
- Sean White
The Kotchman and Snell decisions baffled me. I don't mean by that, "we wondered how the M's could be so dumb;" I mean by that, "we wondered what in the world the Mariners knew that we didn't." We did, and do, presume that when the M's do something inexplicable, it's because of information not available to us. The fact is that Jack Zduriencik is vastly better-informed than anybody in blog-land.
The Kotchman and Snell decisions were so strange that we presumed the M's had information on Kotchman and funny training methods, or something. Everything else they did -- Bradley, Fister, Lee, the Lopez/Figgins swap, Johnson at C, Morrow/League, Sweeney, etc etc, looked like one outstanding move after another.
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In this post, we noted that Kotchman's wonderful mitt is what advanced him from slightly below RLP to slightly above RLP. Not good enough in any, um, case.
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=== I Had a No-Hitter Going Until the Big Kids Got Out of School ===
Opening Night, SSI gave it up for Kotchman, who had a big night and led the M's to a 1-0 record. In the "Stick that in your blog and smoke it, Doc," we demonstrated that we've got nothing against being proven wrong on a player.
Two weeks into the season, Kotchman was raking and SSI was glad to emphasize that Zduriencik was, impossibly, tied with SSI in the pre-season Nostradamus Derby. ;- ) Kotchman was pretty dialed in, and though we continued to bet the under, we had nothing against declaring victory for the pro-Kotchman camp.
At the All-Star Break, we sez, you can cash in your winning tickets if you're still holding 'em.
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Various and sundry were the logical arguments that Kotchman would have a big year. One ingenious argument wondered whether Kotchman's home parks had punished fly balls to right. SSI ran a 3-parter on Classical Conditioning in response.
Certainly, we agreed, a hitter's home park can warp his entire game. Let's hope that Kotchman is one of the rare birds for whom this factor actually flies. Unlikely, we says, but worth watching.
We watched. It didn't happen. The theory was logical, but not valid.
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There was always a lotto chance on Kotchman, just because he's age 27 with an EYE near 1.00. You couldn't rule him out, but we didn't like the odds.
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