Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Time to worry about Jesse Carlson?

It's easy to jump to conclusions pretty quickly about relievers, especially when they've had a couple of bad outings, but should we be worried about the effectiveness of Jesse Carlson?

Monday marked the 2nd straight sour outing in a tight ball game by the diminutive lefty. Though he eventually wound up with the win, Carlson surrendered a 2-run shot to Jim Thome in the top of the 8th, erasing a 2 run edge. The Jays scored one in the bottom half of the frame ro let him off the hook and award him a victory. On Thursday, it was Carlson's poor pitch to Hideki Matsui in the 8th inning that led to a series clinching solo home run fpr the Yankees. He's also had a rough outing against Cleveland in early May, and was saddled with the extra innings loss mid-April to the Twins.

The 28-year old Carlson took a long trip to the major leagues, and has been mostly quite productive since being called up in early 2008. The question is, however, has the league caught up to him? Will he no longer be an effective relief pitcher in the Blue Jays bullpen?

2 comments:

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

Not yet, mate.

Thome's a beast. That was an opposite field shot. Sometimes you've just got to tip your cap.

Jesse will bounce back. He cares too much. It was fucking great to see the offense pick him back up.

Michael Harrison said...

I would tend to agree too, Carlson has been solid. That's the amazing thing about this offense, any time a reliever has messed up, they pick him up, its incredible!

Just saw your website, good work on there man.