FanPost

With 90 games left...


All things considered, being 35-37 at this point in the season is pretty remarkable. There have been a lot of positives and negatives that I'm sure anybody who is spending time on this blog are already aware of, so I won't bother rehashing them. In an attempt to get the discussion away from a lot of trades that would be pretty cool but are also pretty unlikely, I wanna know what you want to see from this organization over the next 3 months that would make this season a success (other than a 47-43 record). Personally, my list would look a little like this:

1) Pedro returns healthy and hits like he did last September-Honestly, this could be the whole list. People keep talking about adding an impact bat but let's not forget we have a 24-year old, cost controlled one in our system right now. I don't wanna have to look up the community projections, but this is a guy who most figured could have put up 25-30 HR and an .800-.850 OPS this season for us. He has to get straightened out.

2) Progression out of the "Big 3"-Jameson Taillon, Stetson Allie and Luis Heredia have all now pitched a professional baseball game. Let's not undersell how big it would be for this franchise to watch all 3 perform well and work through the rough patches that show up in your first big league season.

3) Bounce back 2nd half-There are a bunch of guys who have had lousy first halves to 2011. In a few cases, they are players that the franchise was relying on to different degrees and it would be great if guys like Rudy Owens and Tony Sanchez could finish this year strong to set themselves up for a big 2012.

4) Regression to the mean for streaky players-Neil Walker, Jose Tabata, Charlie Morton and James Macdonald have all done really good things this year. They have also all fallen into slumps of some kind. I don't think Charlie Morton is as good as he looked when he was dominating the NL and I don't think he's as bad as he looked while he watched his WHIP jump up over 1.5. I think all of these guys can and will get back to the middle ground where they are all very good and valuable big league players.

5) Well deserved promotions-There are a few of these and I think this is one that's probably the most likely to happen but we need to see Brad Lincoln, Alex Presley, Chase D'Arnaud, and Starling Marte move up a level. There are others who are probably just as deserving but these guys are the most interesting to me and want them all at the next level by August 1st.

Bonus: Maybe it's cheating since they aren't part of the organization yet but getting Cole, Bell and Dickerson under contract would also be a huge win for this franchise.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of the managing editors or SB Nation. FanPosts are written by Bucs Dugout readers.