Thursday, August 5, 2010

Andres Torres' Golden Sombrero: Legal PED Edition

A golden sombrero is awarded to a player who manages to strike out four times in a single game (real golden sombrero not included). It's quite the feat unless you're Ryan Howard or Mark Reynolds. Unfortunately, cycles and no-hitters are all the rage nowadays. Not for me, though. I will pour over the box scores to bring you the finest at swinging and missing.

Andres Torres is enjoying his breakout season with the Giants at the ripe age of 32-years-old. Torres bounced around baseball since 1998 but never had more than 185 major league plate appearances in a season (2003 with Detroit) until this year. In his 455 career PA's, Torres had 7 home runs and a .232/.290/.372 line. But this season, at 32-years-old and in 398 plate appearances, Torres has 11 home runs and a .286/.372/.506 line. Late bloomer? Change in approach?

Actually, he was diagnosed with ADHD and now legally takes Adderall. Now, the Adderall could have helped his concentration and that's why he's miraculously turned around what was just a minor league career. Or he's found one of the performance enhancing drug loopholes. Adderall is basically speed which was the PED of choice in the 70's. For some reason, we choose to ignore that Hall of Famers were taking illegal substances in the 70's to boost performance but we're up in arms over the steroid usage of the late 90's and 2000's.

Okay, sorry. That rant felt long overdue. None of the PEDs in the world could have helped Andres Torres yesterday. He went 0-4 with 4 strikeouts. Let's take a look at how many times that came from the right arm of Ubaldo Jimenez...

Top 1st: Torres struck out swinging against Jimenez. Jimenez brought his good stuff to the park yesterday and K'ed 9 so this probably wasn't just a "concentration" issue for Torres.

Top 3rd: Torres struck out swinging against Jimenez again. Okay, maybe you could look into upping those 40 MG of Adderall.

Top 6th: Torres struck out swinging against Jimenez. Again, that's an MTD Hat Trick. He struck out 3 times, the same way, against the same pitcher. Why isn't this catching on? Are you not telling your friends? Why doesn't Joe Buck return my texts?

Top 8th: Torres struck out swinging against Matt Belisle.

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