skyking162

With the Brewers’ expected to contend for the NL Central again this year, recent news that Yovani Gallardo has a torn cartilage in his right knee isn’t good news. Gallardo was a top pitching prospect and made his MLB debut last year, throwing 110 innings with a 2.7 K/BB ratio and 3.67 ERA. Injuries are never a good thing, but given the type of injury and Milwaukee’s starting pitcher situation, this one is about as small a deal as possible…

• Young pitchers shouldn’t be throwing a high number of innings, so missing the first month of the season is one way to limit Gallardo’s season total.
• At least it’s not a throwing arm injury. No, leg injuries aren’t good for pitchers either, but there’s a good chance he won’t have to worry about the knee after he heals from the surgery.
• Milwaukee has two pitchers they seem to be underrating in Dave Bush and Chris Capuano. Neither are aces, but are more valuable than their 2007 ERAs indicated. While their actual ERAs were over 5.00, their expected ERAs were more like 4.40 adjusting for fielding and some bad luck. With up to a month to watch these two guys pitch, maybe Ned Yost will figure out that they belong in the rotation ahead of Carlos Villanueva, who did deserve to have an ERA approaching 5.00 last year.

There you go, two reasons why the injury isn’t that bad and one why Gallardo’s absence may help the Brewers make correct decisions they benefit from for more than a month.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.