Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times thinks Wladimir Balentien and Jeff Clement need to step up now. Not in a couple of weeks or in a month. The two rookies need to be contributing members of the Mariners now or risk certain death.
At least, that’s the tone of Mr. Baker’s blog post on Seattle’s newest call ups.
He has a point. Considering how much money this team is being paid, they can’t afford to have a rebuilding year with new talent. The Mariners need the new talent to step up.
This attitude reminds me of comments I made fun of yesterday made by Carlos Silva. Just to refresh your mind:
To be honest, one thing that I see here is too (many) changes,” Silva said after suffering his first loss of the season. “Sometimes we do something wrong and we want to change the whole thing. We have to stay right there, because when we start changing a lot of things, we’re going to go down.”
Maybe Silva was right. Brad Wilkerson and Jose Vidro weren’t getting the job done. Wilkerson is now gone and Vidro will have to earn back his spot in the starting nine. But both have played Major League Baseball for awhile and both know and understand how to break out of a slump. They wouldn’t have the added pressure of trying to make a name for yourself with less than a month’s worth of Major League experience under your belt.
I’m not saying that Wilkerson and Vidro were going to just snap their fingers and hit .300 all of a sudden. But when a team is as mediocre as the Mariners are right now, you’d have to be a can’t-miss prospect to have the kind of impact and be the kind of spark that Seattle wants from Clement and Balentien.
From my limited experience watching, I think neither player is that kind of prospect. Balentein has had two impressive home runs, but that 1-for-14 funk worries me. And Clement hasn’t done too much since he’s been called up.
Hey, it’s still early in the experiment and maybe they will become studs and turn things around. But I don’t see it happening.
And I wonder if Seattle would’ve been better served just waiting it out with the veterans rather than rushing to a pair of unproven rookies.