Second Half Preview

It may be a bit before getting to getting to the rest of the posts today, but I wanted to get this up before the day got away from me.

Brett from RattlersReport.com and the Post-Crescent has a Q&A with Rattler manager Jim Horner today.

Horner offers 'guarantee' of better baseball

If you are in the Fox Cities, this is a 4-page pull out in the sports section of Saturday's paper.

Highlights:

Q: There were high hopes for this team coming out of spring training. Six on the original roster were rated by Baseball America as among the top 30 prospects in the Seattle Mariners minor league system. What went wrong?

A: The biggest thing is that we're developing pitchers and position players at the same time, which is extremely hard to do. When you have young pitchers and young position players behind them, the young pitchers are going to make mistakes. The key is for those young players behind them to pick them up. And when you have young and young, it's hard to do.

I'm still not sold the team wouldn't have figured it out if we would have kept everybody here and together. But it's also hard for a young kid to go to the plate and see on the scoreboard that he's hitting .200 or .180 because then he's trying to do too much to get out of that hole.

Q: What's more important, developing talent or developing winners?

A: When you're dealing with player development, it's hard to balance it between developing young kids and winning. You try to balance it where you can develop some young kids and win at the same time, but it's hard to do. We started off this year with players that are going to play in the big leagues. I feel that. The Seattle Mariners feel that. Just because they came here and struggled doesn't mean they're not going to play in the big leagues.

There are some Q's about the "incident" involving the three Rattler pitchers from before the last road trip:

Q: What's your take on the situation involving pitchers Anthony Varvaro, Kyle Parker and Steve Richard? The three were accused of ramming their cars in a Grand Chute apartment complex parking lot. It turned out it was a team prank, but Varvaro and Parker were issued a town summons for obstructing police and disorderly conduct of a motor vehicle, while Richard landed in the Outagamie County Jail on a charge of resisting or obstructing police.

A: They were playing a joke on a teammate, and the unfortunate thing is not everybody in the world gets the joke. Probably not the best joke to be playing. The good thing was there wasn't any alcohol involved. They just basically ended up lying about it and got in trouble for it. The Mariners as an organization are obviously sorry about it. They just used poor judgment. Hopefully, people will understand because they are three of the better kids. They really are.

More at the link on that.

Q: What will we notice as being the primary difference in your team as you move from the first half to the second half?

A: The last five games (of the first half) that I've seen since we had a lot of these new guys here, I see a lot better baseball. You saw teams that were competitive and up to the par of the league. You saw better at-bats, better defense. You just saw better baseball. I'm not going to go out and say, 'Hey, we're going to win the second half.' But I can almost guarantee you we'll be an above-.500 club the second half.

Also, tonight is Tony Butler Bobblehead Night in Appleton. Brett has this on that:

On his initial reaction

Whenever you look at a bobblehead of somebody else, you think it looks like them. But then when you look at one of you, you kind of think to yourself, 'Does that actually look like me?' I think it's pretty accurate. Some of the features are pretty close. I like it. It's cool.

Plenty more plus a picture of the bobblehead at the link.