"El Caballo Encouraged to Trot to first"

When I saw the above headline on astros.com I could not resist having a gentle poke. I thought Lee had been doing that already without Brad Mills telling him to do it. Or perhaps he's going too fast on the way to first and he needs to make sure he doesn't overexert himself. Or is this a horse joke? I'm confused. This is the guy who has a .048 BA on balls hit to the infield and routinely gets nabbed by a few meters on balls hit deep in the hole.

Turns out the article was about encouraging Lee to take more walks. And since the trade deadline, he has done a pretty good job at that, netting 11 BOB in 14 games in August. He's also got a .152 BA and .217 SLG%. Not so good. Its easy to tell when a player is done, when they succeed at one thing, it knocks about ten other things out of whack. In this instance, the ability to draw walks has destroyed Lee's ability to hit, and to hit for power.

Perhaps Mills should just bat him ninth and tell him to do nothing but draw walks. Not even allowing him to swing the bat. Lets do that. Talking of Lee's struggles, Mills said:

"I want to get him going," Mills said. "He needs to get going. The last month, he's still got 19 RBIs in the last 28-30 days, which isn't terribly bad, but at the same time, he's still not that type of hitter he can be."

You want to get him going by telling him to draw more walks. Hmm...