Anthony Reyes is not a great pitcher. But he has the potential to be a decent starter. If only his manager and pitching coach would stop clucking like a couple of hens.
Yesterday, Reyes pitched six shutout innings in his latest audition for the St. Louis Cardinal rotation. But there were dark intimations the wind might have helped him.
First his pitching coach, Dave Duncan, damned him with faint praise:
“I always say the bottom line is what you look at,” Duncan said. “It’s not how you get it but if you get it. In Anthony’s case, the bottom line is there today.”
But the manager must have been afraid his henchman hadn’t driven the point home:
“He made a lot of good pitches,” La Russa said. “Whatever the wind was doing he made some good pitches. He was helped a little by the wind. He may have been hurt by the wind. Mostly, he helped himself.”
At which point Duncan came to life and piled on:
“For me, it was a real difficult game to evaluate the performances of the pitchers,” Duncan said.
The subtleties of the wind clouded their judgment. And yet these are the same guys who, when it was in their interest, managed to miss that Mark McGwire was juiced beyond belief.
If I were Anthony Reyes, I wouldn’t feel like I was being set up for success.
Jack Silbert, curator