Parra sent to Nashville; Narveson up

[RU Rah Rah]

Body language has absolutely nothing to do with success at the major league level in my opinion.

I have to agree. IIRC, poor "body language" was invoked when Burnitz and the Brewers parted ways. (What was it? Ned didn't like his body language after he K'd? Something like that.) It seems to be a bizarre criteria for judging a player.

[Ennder]

I don't see how they could bring him back up unless he has like 5 or 6 dominant starts in a row and by then we'll probably have someone set in the rotation and not want to replace them. So I gotta agree that he doesn't come back up unless there is an injury to someone.

[PeaveyFury]

TheCrew07 wrote:Your arrogance is astounding, there's no better way to put it.

 

Despite what you may think, there do exist opinions different than yours, opinions that are equally as valid as any that you have posited. Just because a poster hasn't pitched or coached baseball - which is an assumption that you've so benevolently seen fit to share with us - doesn't make their opinion any less valid. Frankly, if coaching baseball makes a person wiser, or playing baseball makes a person wiser, someone needs to tell Dusty Baker and Joe Morgan, because they missed the memo.

 

This puts it very well. Arrogant or not, thecrew07, calling it such violates our rules against personal attacks.

[pete]

His body language looks the same as when he was dominating. Is his body language bad when he is doing really well?

[BrewCrewWS2008]

to me I think he will be ready to come up when he ready to come up...You watch him on the mount it's like Yince Young against the Jaguars this season when he was so broken down the other team even tryed to help pick him up. You watch his last start you could just see his confidence and everything just draining away. I have pitched and got rocked before and it sucks and hurts your confidence but to get rocked what is it 5 or 6 straight games almost mentally that is hard to deal with.

 

I think he just needs to go down there clear his head, pitch some good outings and get his confidence back. We all know he has the stuff to be a 2 or 3 pitcher in the MLB but any player who doesn't have confidence or swagger out there is done for. I hope he figures it out soon.

[Ennder]

Confidence or no confidence the bottom line is he has to locate his pitches better. No amount of confidence is going to make up for not being able to locate his breaking stuff which he hasn't done all year and which he struggled with off and on last year.

[markedman5]

I think it comes down to what comes first the chicken or the egg?

 

Does he locate the ball better and then get more confident in his ability or does he need more confidence in order to locate the ball better?

 

Probably both.

 

At this point it doesn't really matter.....We can all agree that he isn't pitching at close to a major league level and until he can consistently do that he won't be pitching in Milwaukee.

[BrewCrewWS2008]

you can't locate your pitches if you don't have confidence in what your throwing. I think you really underestimated the mental aspect of baseball or well sports in general. The best major leaguers are guys that can keep their composure and their heads on straight. Doesn't matter if your hitting or pitching. When hitters go on droughts they lose their confidence and continue to struggle and struggle until they finally get a spark that gets their confidence back up and they build off of it. Manny we hasn't had anything at all to give him any trust in his pitches. Ask anyone who has pitched (I don't know if you have or not but if you did then I tip my hat to for for being one of the every few to be able to locate pitches that you don't believe in) if you don't trust in what your throwing its hard to place it where you want to.
If you don't have confidence that you can get every hitter out, well your not going to attack the same and you won't get hitters out.


As it's been said forever in sports the game is 98% mental and 2% physical, if your head isn't on right, your game won't be eighter. I see it when I'm coaching football and baseball and went throw when I played sports. Thats why as coaches you always have to spoon feed your players with positives. You can't every let a kid loss his confidence cause then your screwed.

[lukevan]

What makes a person confident though?

 

I say confidence is knowing that you can do something. If you try to do something and figure out how to do it well, you are confident that you can do it again. If you can't do it, then you are not so confident. Confidence is the result of skill put into practice.

[Ennder]

As it's been said forever in sports the game is 98% mental and 2% physical

 

If you really believe this we will have to agree to disagree because I don't think that is anywhere close to true, it is just a cliche. I don't care how much I believe that I can hit a 100 MPH fast ball I just don't have the talent to do it. I don't care how confident a pitcher is in their pitch it won't always be a strike.

[homer]

I think there's something to the confidence argument but I also think people use it as a crutch too often and attribute too much importance/significance to it.

[Tbadder]

Okay, but the mental part of the game gets short shrifted around here because it's not quantifiable. That's a bias we have at Brewerfan.net--so be it. There are a ton of intelligent people around here compared to most other sites which can be almost purely emotional. But again, it works both ways. If anything the mental approach is radically disregarded here, much less a crutch. BABIP and WHIP and OPS and etc. rule supreme here if anything.

[Ennder]

The mental side of the game doesn't matter at all when you discuss things like OPS though. It doesn't matter if a player gets his OPS from being confident or because he is scrappy or because he is big or because he is talented. Stats incorporate both the physical and mental side of the game.

[Tbadder]

Because they don't describe the mental side of the game--stats are pure physical accounts. They in fact ignore them. Find any number of the pitchers with similar stats as Manny Parra. Do they each have the same disposition? Do they react or praise or pressure in the same way? Of course not. Now, you're saying that's my point, that's what I just said. Not really. Because it doesn't provide a solution to the said stats. And it's that variation and that subtlety that stats will never tell. That's where a good coach, who can understand his ballplayer, can affect a shift in disposition that will enable the players OPS or WHIP or whatever to skew physically in a positive direction. For Manny Parra's sake and the sake of the Brewers who have a huge stake in Parra they need a solution that is mechanical, and mental, and productive or they're chances of going to the playoffs have been decreased.

[Diskono]

Because they don't describe the mental side of the game--stats are pure physical accounts. They in fact ignore them.

What he's saying is that mental aspects of the game are a contributing factor in the physical events that occur. So if a guy is freaked out by pressure, and starts throwing balls, the stats count that. But I think you're both right...stats definitely account for all aspects of the game, including mental - what I think you're saying is that there isn't a stat that shows *just* the mental part, which is probably true. One guy might walk a lot of batters because he's afraid of pressure, another might walk a lot simply because he's not good enough.

 

We do have situational splits, though, which can tell us some things.

[Tbadder]

Understood. Just agree to disagree. (insert thumbs up)

[JJHardy7]

Note you said when he was in the minors and pitching well....neither one of those have been happening for quite some time. I hope he has great body language and results in Nashville--far away from Milwaukee.

 

What is quite some time? It's not like Parra sucked all of last year. My point is before the Fielder thing and when he was pitching well nobody cared about his body language. I find that somewhat strange and to be honest annoying. He's struggling...no doubt. What do you expect him to do? Smile as he gets pulled out? Smile as he gives up a run? He hasn't handled it well. I'll agree with you there, but he cares. He knows he's not pitching well and it seems like he's taking the demotion pretty well since he knew he wasn't pitching well. Let's not get carried away that Parra has always sucked, is poor mentally, and has terrible body language all the time.

 

When he was taken out, the first thing I thought was that he is getting sent down. My next thought was that, just going off his body language and the way he seems to handle things, it wouldn't surprise me if he just up and quit baseball.

 

Are you claiming to be a fortune teller or something? Your thoughts are fine, but the general thought was that he had to turn things around. As far as your thoughts about quitting baseball, that's a pretty low blow. I love how these things are just fact now that Parra is so mentally weak that he's going to quit baseball. Come on. I've seen Parra pitch very well in the minors...even though he is so mentally 'weak', has poor body language, and will quit baseball. Seriously...I feel that the negativity on this board is back with a fury. Suggesting that a player on the Brewers is going to quit baseball because he can't handle things is IMO one of the lowest blows a 'fan' can make towards one of their players. It's embarrassing to be a fan when these statements are made by people who have no clue what type of mental makeup a player has.

 

I've met Parra a few times and he's not mentally weak or whatever junk you want to say. He's struggling and to be honest is trying too hard. A trip to Nashville is what he needs. A week or two ago people posted that he had 'electric' stuff. Now he's going to quit baseball...come on.

[logan82]

How long does Parra have to stay down for us to gain an extra year?

[kramnoj]

Here's my guess so far, he has 71 days of service time this year. According to Cots, he came into the year with 1 year and 77 days of service time. I year of ST is 172 days. If I guessed right, it would mean that he would need to accumulate no more than 24 days of ST if they try to get an extra year. So even if he played out the season in the minors and came up Sep 1, he would still get that extra year.

[logan82]

I was hoping it would be more like a month or less. Not that I would use it as a deciding factor in leaving him in the minors if we think he can help us this year.

[JohnBriggs12]

I can't believe anyone is worrying about an extra year for Parra. He'll be lucky if he ever gets to his second arbitration year. He's been worse than Wes Obermueller over a pretty long stretch and it's going to take more than a couple good starts in AAA to convince any team (much less the Brewers that witnessed his struggles close up) that he's ready to win in the majors. It's not like he wasn't given chances.

[Ennder]

I can't believe anyone is worrying about an extra year for Parra. He'll be lucky if he ever gets to his second arbitration year. He's been worse than Wes Obermueller over a pretty long stretch

 

If by pretty long you mean 5 games then sure. Parra had a 4.39 ERA last year and peripherals that were better than his ERA. He had an ERA in the mid 4's just a month ago with peripherals that were again better than his ERA. I know you really like to pile it on when you don't like a player but comments like this are just so far off base.

 

Parra may not recover from this, just look at Fausto Carmona and Dontrelle Willis for examples of guys who lost their command and never got it back. But there are examples of pitchers who did come back from control issues like this as well, there is no reason to give up on a guy like Parra.

[Thurston Fluff]

This may end up being a good thing. The team can go for a couple weeks with an extra bullpen arm and Parra can take a breather away from the pressure. Given how many 6 inning type pitchers we have a deeper pen is good. It also gives the Brewers a chance to see if Narveson can establish himself as the second lefty out of the pen. If he can it will help in the long run. If Parra can go down and work through his issues quickly they can just reinsert him. If not whomever takes his place won't be much worse so we don't really lose anything. SO on the plus side we might find that illusive second lefty on the negative side we end up with the same bad start every 5th game.

Then again I thought Parra was going to have a good year so what do I know.

 

 

 

Of course Yost never did what he said he was going to do by leaving Parra out there well beyond where he should have been.

 

As I recall both Yost and Melvin was asked about the workload and Melvin was the one who said it was a special situation. Meaning the team circumstances were such that they fully intended to use him as much as needed to help get to the playoffs. You really can't pin this one on Yost. It was Melvin who told Yost to make the playoffs or else then gave him a young pitcher coming off an injury and very few innings/year to work with. I'm not sure what could reasonably be expected of Yost in that situation other than to not be Yost. Even then it wouldn't have changed the circumstance or outcome it just would have made people look for the real culprit.

I also question if last year's workload has any bearing on this year's production. I know a huge jump in innings is hard on the pitchers physical health but never heard anyone say it hurt their mental well being. If this was an injury issue then maybe we could blame it on last year's workload and Melvin could be blamed. It is not so we should not.

[Invader3K]

I guess one thing that frustrates me a bit is that it was obvious we were not going to be able to count on these five pitchers to carry us the entire year. Not having someone who you can reliably take out of the bullpen and insert into the rotation, or having someone waiting in the wings in Nashville was a bit shortsighted, I think. I know there wasn't much out there in terms of free agency or the trade market during the off season that Melvin could realistically get...but how many teams use the same five starters the entire season? I would guess virtually none. It was a forgone conclusion that someone would be bad, or get injured, and have to be replaced.

[joepepsi]

I guess one thing that frustrates me a bit is that it was obvious we were not going to be able to count on these five pitchers to carry us the entire year.

What happened to Chase Wright?