Jonathan Sanchez likely to make next start

Jonathan Sanchez is currently in line to make his next start on Friday, the Post-Gazette reports. Given that Clint Hurdle yanked Sanchez from his last start for preemptive reasons (a good decision, I thought), one might have expected the Pirates to replace Sanchez. There isn't anyone at Triple-A who's really calling out for a promotion, though (Phil Irwin hasn't pitched since the weekend before last, so I'm not sure what's going on there). I'm not sure Jeanmar Gomez would really be an improvement, despite his superficially nice numbers so far. And it will be a little while longer before Francisco Liriano or Charlie Morton are ready. So it appears to Bucs will stick with Sanchez for now.

Just for fun, Sanchez's ERAs for the last three teams for which he's played. ERA is generally a pretty silly statistic, but I was just on Sanchez's Baseball Reference profile, and these jumped off the page.

Royals 7.76
Rockies 9.93
Pirates 11.12

Those are small sample sizes, of course. Teams don't usually let their pitchers accumulate large sample sizes with those kinds of numbers. And Sanchez's peripheral numbers suggest he's been better than those ERAs, which of course isn't that hard to do. But Sanchez is surely at the point where he isn't going to get another chance in the majors, at least not without posting some good numbers at the minor-league level first.