Saturday, May 23, 2009

Open Letter to Jason Bergmann

Dearest Bergy,

As your unapologetic biggest fan, I'm so glad to see you back with the Nationals and having success.

I know, Mike Rizzo hates you, Manny treats you as a mop-up man despite the fact that you've been more effective than pretty much anyone else in the bullpen. It's more or less inevitable at this point that barring a Rizzo firing your career will have to continue somewhere else.

Still, even if the team doesn't know it, at least this blogger knows that you belong on this team. In fact, no team in baseball is more in need of your particular brand of solidly unspectacular below-average adequacy. Yeah, you'll crap the bed every three or four times when you struggle with command, have a couple flyballs float out, and/or face a particularly tough run of left-handed hitters.

But it's absurd that you ever trailed the likes of Wil Ledezma, Logan Kensing, Daniel Cabrera, Scott Olsen, Kip Wells, or Mike Hinckley on the depth chart.

So until Rizzo finds another hard-throwing groundball pitcher with no command whatsoever, we're glad to have you.

Sincerely,

FJB

4 comments:

James Bjork said...

I was at the game tonite. Bergy looked pretty good to me. Then again, compared to GasCanRaHan and the rest of the offenders in the bullpen, the bar is now pretty low.

Unknown said...

I can't imagine why Kip Wells and Wil Ledezma got the call before Bergy...I'm with you, FREE BERGMANNIA!!!

Craig said...

Agreed. He's better than Olsen and Cabrera. Better attitude. More likeable.

Souldrummer said...

Bergmann is the type of guy we've got to give a shot to in the bullpen. He's young, he's ours, and he's got upside as opposed to the downside of Julian Tavarez.

If I remember correctly, wasn't some of our reluctance to keep him on the roster after spring training due to his having options and others not having options?

I know he's a fly ball pitcher. But don't we have a ballpark where fly ball pitching isn't all that bad. And didn't the Mets just get a ballpark in our division where fly ball pitching isn't that bad?

I was glad to see Bergmann pitch well over the weekend and hopefully he inherits Mock's role in the bullpen as a primary right handed setup guy.

I'm not ready to give up on Hanrahan yet, though. Probably because I'm not a season ticket holder paying for all of those blown saves early.