By now, you’ve probably heard that the current back-up plan to Brad Lidge in the ninth is one of our resident Cuban defectors. Fortunately, it’s the good one. In your face, Ryan Edmund!

I suck. Just like TheRuckus said I would!

Jose Contreras is, to use the technical parlance, owning the shit out of the hitters right now. His velocity is up, and his breaking pitches look awesome. His swinging strike rate is an eye-popping 22.3% – to put that in perspective, Brad Lidge’s 2008 mark was 15.3%. His 16.43 K/9 is second in the majors behind Carlos Marmol (or CarLOLs MarmLOL, as the case may be). All caveats about small sample size acknowledged, so far Contreras is doing a good job of making me look like the genius I am.

Last night against the Cardinals, he entered the game in the 10th, quickly striking out Ryan Ludwick on a two-seamer that the stadium gun recorded at 98. Of course, that gun also clocked Hamels at 95, so it was probably a little hot. Let’s move on before I have to make a dumb taser joke. Anyway, Contreras had Albert Pujols looking mortal on a couple of splitters before surrendering a double on a 1-2 pitch that was more a result of terrible defense by Ben Francisco than anything else. He bounced back to fan Matt Holliday on an absolutely filthy split and got David Freese to foul out to first.

Lidge looked decent last night, but Charlie rightly wants to ease him back into the swing of things. Contreras is pretty clearly the best reliever on the team right now, and it behooves us to use him as such. Hopefully, more like we did last night than with a three-run lead in the ninth, but I’ll take anything that keeps Danys Baez from pitching multiple innings. Or at all, really.