In Praise of the LOOGY

It's a slow day, but I enjoyed this article about LOOGYs (which stands for "Lefty One-Out Guys," for the uninitiated) over at the New Republic. It's not particularly Pirates-related, since the Bucs don't have a LOOGY right now (the Pirates used Damaso Marte as one for a while, but he's gone now) and, generally, LOOGYs are a luxury the Bucs can't really afford. If they have a lefty reliever who's any good at all, their best bets are to either trade him or let him get more work than your average LOOGY usually does. That's what they did with Scott Sauerbeck, who was really good against lefties for much of his tenure with Pittsburgh but pitched too much against righties while with the Bucs to be a LOOGY proper.

Incidentally, Sean Burnett's best path to a long career is as a LOOGY--sub-5.00 ERA aside, he was pretty awful last year and he was downright terrible against righties, but he did hold lefty batters to a .171 batting average against.