dave;431591 wrote:I'm pretty excited to see what this team can do tonight with the chance to take over 1st place again. Janish gets rewarded with the start after missing a sign, I guess that's Dustyball. Rolen should be available to pinch hit, so Gomes, Rolen, Hanigan, Heisey is a pretty solid bench if they can keep Oswalt from going real deep.
It is not Dusty's style to reward or deny playing time the next day because of performance. In fact there was a time this year that a player made a bonehead play, I think Stubbs, and he was out the next day and Dusty was quick to point out that is wasn't due to the poor play, but a planned day off.
I think there has been maybe just one or two cases of performance changing the amoung of playing time this year. One is Gomes doing so well that Nix' playing time has been reduced. I thought at the beginning it would be pretty much a platoon situation in LF with Nix and Gomes with Nix probably getting more since there are more righty pitchers. I also thought that Dickerson and Stubbs would platoon more in CF, and that didn't happen even though Stubbs wasn't doing that well, then the Dickerson injury took care of that. The 2nd situation that may have been rewarded with playing time would be Hanigan, Before he got hurt he was playing about half the games compared to Ramon playing the majority early. I don't know if that was planned as the wear and tear of the season progressed, or Hanigan doing well, especially in knocking in runs, was a factor in Dusty's mind.
In my mind Dusty needs to make just one change in playing time, Cabrera/Janish. Cabrera gets tired easily and needs more time off. Tonight he cracked three hits his first 3 ABs, then he looked spent after that and hit into two double plays, and seemed to be spent running the bases on his last hit, and the two DPs.