Pirates Activate Phil Dumatrait, Place Jeff Karstens on Bereavement List
by Charlie on Aug 21, 2009 3:43 PM EDT
41 comments
The Bucs have activated Phil Dumatrait in what could prove to be the longest wait for the smallest reward since the Stone Roses' second album. Dumatrait didn't pitch well in his rehab assignments, didn't pitch well for the Pirates last year, didn't pitch well in the Reds organization the year before that, and wasn't all that great a prospect to begin with. He is, however, left-handed, so there's that. Otherwise, I don't think he'd have any reasonable claim to a roster spot, even on a team as reliever-starved as the Pirates are.
In the short term, he'll take the place of Jeff Karstens, who has been placed on the bereavement list so he can visit with his sick grandmother. The Pirates will still have to make another move to clear a spot for Dumatrait on the 40-man roster, since Karstens is still on it.
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Roster doings...
I believe that there is an as yet unannounced 40 man move still coming. I thought that the way the rule read…to cover for bereavement leave…it has to be someone on the 40 man roster as a replacement. Being on the 60 day DL…doesn’t count against the 40 man. Once Dumatrait came off the 60 day DL…he was eligible to replace Karstens…but somebody had to come off the 40 man to activate Phil.
Salazar cleared waivers yesterday and was outrighted to Indy…according to the transactions on Pirates.com.
Second Coming
“I like it.”
It’s not as bad as everyone says in my opinion, just couldn’t compare to the first but really few albums could.
I made most of my life decisions at a Foghat concert... I stand by them.
by Chester J Lampwick on Aug 21, 2009 4:23 PM EDT reply actions
The reason it gets a bad rap
is because of how long people had to wait, not really the material.
Well it was only 5 years (I believe) and admist contract disputes that delayed the album. Furthermore I think that Ian Brown had a kid while they working on it so it was delayed further. I guess those points don’t really address your point though but I’ve always heard it criticized more because of quality than delay which is also how Charlie’s analogy works
I think Chinese Democracy is a better analogy than Second Coming although that album is more the quality of Yoslan Herrera.
I made most of my life decisions at a Foghat concert... I stand by them.
by Chester J Lampwick on Aug 21, 2009 5:33 PM EDT up reply actions
I LOL
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Aug 21, 2009 7:56 PM EDT up reply actions
Oops - it
Should say, “I LOL’D.”
Even though the Stone Roses LP wasn’t that bad, as noted above.
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Aug 21, 2009 7:57 PM EDT up reply actions
I had asked DK on the PG blog...
and in his notes update…he mentioned that someone does have to come off the 40 man…and they are still deciding who. Sure we will know in the next 3 hours. Bootcheck or Bautista is my bet.
but if it's one of those 2
then you have to make another 25-man move.
and if it’s not, it’d have to be one of: Sues, Lerud, Uviedo, A. Diaz, R. Diaz, Meloan, Alvarez, Clement, Walker, Tabata (all quite unlikely)
Or you could go with 24 tonight and DFA Bautista (that’d be my preference)
Alternately, there could be a trade of someone from the 40-man (like R. Diaz) for a PTBNL (who could clear waivers and join the 40-man after this mess is clear)
I forgot
Hacker in that list.
and also Virgil Vasquez (he’d be choice 3 in my book – after Bautista and Bootcheck)
to be fair
I think you are selling Doumatrait short Charlie. Early last year he was our best and most consistent starter until his injury. I saw him pitch in Washington and he had them like 2 hits through 5 and then there was a light malfunction and he lost his rhythm and gave up a couple solos I think but he went about 4 or 5 starts in a row throwing quite well and then had about 2 stinkers before they diagnosed him.
Yes, but check out his peripherals, which are a complete mess. He tacked a couple runs onto his ERA with the last couple starts, but the 5.26 ERA he ended up with is a fair approximation of the one he deserved, injury or no.
I agree....
I think Dumatrait’s upside is much higher than Charlie does. If you throw out his last two starts last year (which of course still count, but I’m guessing that he was injured by then) and look at the eight starts he made to that point his numbers look like this:
8 starts, 44.6 innings, 35 hits (2 HRs) 3.22 ERA, .219 BAA, 33Ks, 22 BBs. The walks are definitely higher than you would like, but everything is actually pretty good. I think he will certainly be in the mix for a roster spot next year and possibly even in the rotation.
You are chopping up Dumatrait’s sample way too much.
First, if you toss out his last 2 starts, that leaves 9, not 8.
Second, his 10 relief appearances, in addition to those last two starts, still count.
Third, in those nine cherry-picked starts, his BABIP was .270, indicating he was lucky (we know it’s not the Pirates’ stellar defense that was suppressing hits and we know pitchers don’t have this skill in any meaningfully different-from-everyone-else sense at the major league level). His BABIP for the season was .304, which is actually very close to league average, indicating that over the course of the entire season, he wasn’t particularly lucky or unlucky. Just bad.
Fourth, his walk rate wasn’t just “higher than you would like”, it was bad. Even in your cherry-picked sample, he was walking almost 5 batters (4.89) per 9 innings. A high walk rate isn’t so bad if you’re also striking out a zillion batters. Dumatrait’s 6.5 batters per nine innings in the cherry-picked sample and his 5.9 overall for the season doesn’t make up for it.
Fifth, this is his age-27 season and he’s coming off a significant injury (plus, he wasn’t that good in the first place). His upside is about as not-there as it can be at this point.
Long answer: you can find a string of nine games in which anybody performed superficially well. Blind squirrel, nut, etc.
Did Van Benschoten ever do that for 9 starts?
Seriously though, I think doumatrait is a decent option. He has about the same potential as Karstens but he’s a lefty with natural movement. I haven’t seen Hart pitch yet but I don’t like him for some reason and don’t think he will stick. Phil will be a good option to compete with Hart, Karstens, and Mccutchen for the 5th spot/long relief next spring until Lincoln or Alderson are ready for a shot.
Don't know about JVB...
…but Vogelsong had a 20-game stretch at the end of 2005, a little over two months, where he put up a 3.75 ERA. And Keith Osik had a year where he batted .293 with a .843 OPS.
When you have small samples, weird things can happen.
Okay....
Sorry I wrong, I tossed out his last three starts. I didn’t discount them, I made an assumption that it was possible that he was hurt.
I didn’t chop up anything. I think it is perfectly reasonable to look at how he performed as a starter. I picked all his starts until the last three where he got bombed.
It’s not like I suggested he was going to win the Cy Young. I suggested that I thought he would contend for a roster spot. Not sure why you think those numbers are meaningless. All is was suggesting was that the guy has shown some potential. I also don’t understand why guys who are 27 or 28 are now not viable major leaguers all of a sudden.
The numbers you used aren’t meaningless, as long as you use all the numbers. You were the one treating his gas can outings as meaningless and tossing them out, not me. It’s not like I only counted his crappy appearances. I counted all of them.
Nobody said guys who are 27 or 28 aren’t viable major leaguers. They very well can be. What they are is what they are: 27- or 28-year-old possibly-viable major leaguers. 27/28 year olds don’t have upside. They’ve already arrived at whatever upside they have. Dumatrait is a replacement level starter who could probably hide in a bullpen as a long relief/mop-up guy. There’s no real shame in that, but it doesn’t make any sense to say he could be anything more. That’s about as unlikely as me suddenly developing the talent to be a replacement level starter who could probably hide in a bullpen as a long relief/mop-up guy.
Well, that overstates the case a bit. The 27/28 thing isn’t absolute. Players sometimes blossom later. But it’s generally true to say that by the time a player is 27 or 28, he usually is who he is. There may be upside there, but it’d be unwise to depend on it.
My guess would be that even of the small subset of players that blossom later than 27/28, it’s not so much that they suddenly developed later as it is their teams stopped blocking them, or that they went somewhere that they just weren’t blocked.
Or perhaps
the reason he has only gotten this far by 27 is because he’s lost at least 2 seasons due to injury? If he was 25 would we be discounting him? Another thing about older “prospects” is that most players who peak at 27/28 have been around for a bit and maybe some of their improvement was due to that experience, learning umpires, hitters, stadiums? So, no matter what age you debut, the more experience you have, the better you can be. Thus, Dumatrait still has “upside”.
Unfortunately, this just isn’t true. The reason players tend to peak at about 27/28 is because that’s when the human body’s physical skills tend to be at their best. Getting interrupted for a couple seasons by injury doesn’t cause your body to put off the deterioration of physical skills that begins to happen at the age.
But, getting injured....
may certainly slow your development of those skills. If you don’t get to practice it is difficult to improve your skill level.
And the deterioration of the skills that you talk about is generally a very slow process that takes a period of time. Certainly you can fall off a cliff like Big Papi did earlier this year, but it isn’t clear to me that Manny is a much less skilled hitter at 37 than he was 7,8 or 9 years ago. Different people age differently. I would expect Nyjer to age quite well.
I understand physically he should be peaking now
but I was talking about old man skills that come with experience. He hasn’t had much of that, due to injury and performance. My point was just becoming a “vet”, players can get better and that should count as upside as well. Whether the player is more comfortable and gets over any nerves about playing in front of such big crowds, becoming more mature(less partying, offseason conditioning), the body adapting to a 162 game season, learning hitters, umpires, coaches, stadiums. Those can all be ways to improve performance that a 28 year old normally have an advantage over a 23/24/25 year old just breaking in to the league.
That may be true in some cases. I was thinking of guys like Luis Gonzalez or Melvin Mora who played a lot before age 30, just not terribly well.
They started playing well at 30...
most likely because they used PED’s. I believe both of these guys were on the infamous list. Gonzales was never a power hitter until he “bulked” up. Steroids makes it real hard to identify exceptions to the rule these days.
For the record...
…neither Mora nor Gonzalez were mentioned in the Mitchell report.
That said, there are known PED users who likely enjoyed artificial longevity as a result of their use. Benito Santiago would probably be the best example here, but there are others: Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Randy Velarde, Roger Clemens, etc.
Let's try one more time....
I threw out his last three starts because he had a significant injury that shut him down for a year. I’m guessing it didn’t happen on one pitch in his last appearance, so I was speculating that he was hurt. I could very well be wrong, but that was the logic behind it.
So I picked his time when he was starting until the last three before he got hurt. I don’t think that should be difficult to follow or is cherry-picking stats. Just pointing that he was reasonably effective for a period of time last year.
So then you’re just plain ignoring the rest of my comment in which I showed that Dumatrait himself was actually rather ineffective, even in his supposedly good starts? :-)
Well I posted his numbers.....
in his first 8 starts and threw out the last three, which we have discussed. You are 100% correct that his BB% and his K% weren’t great. I agree with everything you pointed out. Again, I was saying that he may contend for a roster spot. Do you think I’m off-base?
Oh, no, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying he’d contend for a roster spot. Like I said, I think he’s probably a replacement level SP or half-decent last-option-out-of-the-pen. My point is merely that he isn’t even as good as his ERA in those 9 starts would seem to indicate, and that there’s very little likelihood of any sort of improvement.
Fact is
his ERA for those (assumed) non-injured starts was 3.20. That’s pretty good, would be best on our team. This in spite of all the walks, and guess what, lots of young lefties have control problems and go on to have successful careers. Randy Johnson walked 6.4! batters per/9 in his minor league career, Ted Lilly is another who avg around 4 in the majors until the last 3 seasons when he (gasp!) improved it to about 2.5 and now he’s a very solid pitcher. Sabathia avg 4.4 in the minors, Bedard 4.7 his first year and he still walks too many.
Now I’m not saying that he will be anywhere near as good as these guys, but to say he has zero potential is silly. If he goes out next year and shows no improvement on his command (though that might be tough considering this is a lost year), THEN it will be time to write him off. For now though, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that he was pitching injured for at least a couple of those bad starts and that he is somewhere in between the 3.2era and the 5.2 realistically, which would make a valuable player.
Every single one of those lefties with control problems you mention also struck out a ton of batters. Strikeout rate is perhaps the single best indicator of future potential for pitchers. K:BB ratio is probably better, but that’s kind of like cheating and combining two together!!
Randy Johnson walked 6.4 batters per 9 in the minors, yeah. He also struck out almost 10 per 9.
Ted Lilly averages almost 8 K/9 IP in the majors (and 9.2 in the minors).
Sabathia averaged 10.4 K/9 in the minors (7.5 in the majors).
Bedard 8.8 K/9 IP in the majors (and 11.0 in the minors).
Just to refresh: Dumatrait’s career K/9 is 5.7 in the majors and 7.0 in the minors, and he has not had a full season averaging over 8 in the minors since 2002. Dumatrait has no business being compared to those pitchers.
The only comparison I'm making
is lefties taking longer to develop their control. No one thinks Dumatrait is going to be CC Sabathia, but all those guys drastically reduced their walk rate and upped the K rate some as well. Lefties just have such great natural movement that it’s harder to control, so if Phil has reasonable improvement (and health!) then I think he can be closer to the 3.2 ERA than the 5.2 ERA, which makes for good trade bait, 4th/5th starter, long relief man.
I don’t see too many complaints about Maholm and looky looky guess what his career numbers are(in many more seasons)? 5.8K /9 in the majors, 7.1 in the minors and not too long ago he was our Ace.
Yes, but Maholm...
…has mostly had good walk rates throughout his career. 3.1/9 through the minors as a whole, a brief spike during his first full season in 2006 (fairly typical for young pitchers as they learn to trust their stuff against ML competition), and then between 2.5/9 and 2.7/9 ever since.
I think Dumatrait’s expected future ERA depends heavily on the type of defense we field in 2010, since he’s such a BIP-heavy pitcher.
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