Multiple series can be compared to that White Sox series from last year, where the Cardinals (read: Mulder and Marquis) allowed thirty-three runs in two games. A bad game pushes an undercurrent of worry and dread right up to the foreground, and here we are.

Panic is a lot more justified this year than last year–when this blog was, if you’ll remember, pretty firmly anti-panic–but I’m not counting them out, if for no other reason than it’s May and summer looms large. What else is there to do, but follow this baseball team and hope for the best? To quote the movie that helped bring back my second-least-favorite Oscar-grab tactic (playing a mentally handicapped character with a few lovable quirks and foibles who teaches us all a valuable lesson): That’s all I have to say about that.

So, uh, how about that Todd Wellemeyer? I believe I am one of the few people outside of his immediate family who has a Todd Wellemeyer story, so here goes: I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw him pitch. I was at a Cubs fan’s house, working on a school yearbook project, and something about him impressed me. Not just impressed, really; I was enamored of whatever this thing was. Now, three or four years later, I can’t for the life of me remember it. (Judging by his ERA since then, he doesn’t remember it either.) It wasn’t the velocity; I want to say it was some sort of nasty sinking change up, combined with a weird delivery. In any case, now that I’ll be seeing him on a regular basis I’ll have something to do when the mop-up pitcher comes in, which will be nice.

Incidentally, I think this is a much better at-least-he-throws-hard gamble than Jorge Sosa was. If I’m given the choice of a guy like Wellemeyer, who has no idea where the ball is going but has an average home run rate, and Jorge “So Long” Sosa, I’ll take Wellemeyer any time. He’s also managed to translate his stuff into strikeouts; I’ll never understand how Sosa’s struck out fewer than six guys per nine innings with a high-90s fastball.

First order of business: it would appear that yesterday’s post is dedicated to VEB commenter punchinjudy and Liam of Hey… Listen! for making the UHF connection and directing me to an early appearance, respectively.

Well. So much for Jason Marquis pitching well after Cardinals wins, or pitching with the full support of La Russa and Duncan, or pitching well. Much has been made already of he and the manager disagreeing completely on a diagnosis–La Russa said he was “just throwing”, Marquis said he was being too fine–but it seems like there’s a more obvious diagnosis: Marquis isn’t a very good starting pitcher.

As things go now, he has no statistic that stands out as befitting a good pitcher: he doesn’t force a lot of groundballs, he doesn’t strike a lot of batters out, he doesn’t keep the ball in the park, and he doesn’t keep it in the strike zone. All this year, he’s rarely gotten his fastball past 92, and it doesn’t have a lot of the movement expected of a sinker. His breaking pitch is inconsistent. Somewhere along the line it was assumed that Marquis had a million-dollar arm and a ten cent head, but I don’t buy it any more.

I also don’t buy the idea that Marquis is lacking in “heart”, my least favorite descriptor of all when it comes to pitchers. It’s normally attributed to Carpenter and Wainwright, among others, who get out of jams and fight their way through late-inning situations. But the reason they can do that is because they’re really good, not because they have some special, intangible ability to bear down when it counts. Because Marquis isn’t nearly as good as Carpenter, he gets into more jams and he gets out of fewer of them.

But in all honesty, I can’t imagine anybody on the Cardinals’ staff having more of this miracle heart than Marquis. Is there anybody who lets his feelings out on the mound more? Who jumps and charges and sidles where most pitchers fidget? Who goes all out in every at-bat, let alone inning pitched? Who stood out there and took a 13-run beating that, even now, has tacked half a run onto his ERA in his walk year?

I hate Marquis as a starter. I think he should be converted to relief and told to throw as hard as possible as soon as possible, and I hope I never see him throw five innings in a game again. But if there’s one thing I think he’s got enough of to be a good major league pitcher, it’s heart.

Meanwhile, Jorge Sosa continues to impress; yesterday he showed what a million-dollar fastball really looks like, throwing a darting pitch up and in to right-handers that clocked between 93-96 miles and hour. The problem, though, is his breaking ball, which can only be discerned as a breaking ball via process of elimination: it’s not a fastball, so–voila! With his most successful outing yet coming on the heels of Marquis’s worst it’s natural that people are already lobbying for his insertion into the rotation. If he can keep his velocity in the same range it’s in now, I’m all for it; but a drop of two or three miles an hour could be devastating to a guy with no second pitch. (Sound familiar?) It’s funny that McLaughlin and Hrabosky were namedropping both Sosa and Josh Hancock as potential starters later this year, while they remain convinced that Wainwright is “conditioned to relieve.” Apparently, they keep him in special condition, while Sosa and Hancock can pretty much switch on a weekly basis.

He reminds me of Jimmy Journell, only without the awesome name and the history of nominal prospect-dom. His fastball hit the high 90s a few times, and he ran it high and tight on hitters to make them look silly. At the same time, he struggled with his splitter even while having success; no more than a third of his off-speed/breaking pitches went where he wanted them. The good thing was that they missed harmlessly, usually a foot off the plate; the first 85 mph non-splitter that he rolls over the plate is going 400 feet.

But it’s good to have a live arm in the pen; now that I’ve stopped thinking about the trade in terms of Deadline Deals, I’ve grown to like it. Underwhelming, but the chance to get an eighth inning reliever where once there was Josh Kinney is non-zero.

Acquired for nothing, so it’s pure upside, but I can’t imagine Dave Duncan will like what he sees; Sosa throws extremely hard, has no secondary pitches, and gives up a ton of homers. Not a bad move, because taking fliers on raw-stuff guys is a good habit; but given the trade-happy mood today, this was the best Jock could do? If Craig Wilson was able all along to be pried away for Shawn Chacon, where were the Cardinals?

Anyway. Last year Sosa, a refugee from the Devil Rays system, became Leo Mazzone’s last Atlanta coup, throwing up a 2.55 ERA as a swingman. In doing so, surprisingly, his strikeout rate plunged. What changed? He took advantage of what would have been the fourth lowest home run/fly ball rate in baseball; only 7% of the flyballs he allowed left the park. It was half his usual total, and this year the pendulum has swung the other way: if he qualified, he would have the highest home run percentage of any pitcher in baseball, at 18.8%.

So he’s probably chaff, but he’s chaff that throws really, really hard. A nice move to make in the middle of May, but not much as far as trading deadline pyrotechnics go.