Javier Lopez’s short Pirate career comes to an end today, as he’s been shipped to San Francisco for Joe Martinez. Martinez is a 27-year old pitcher who’s never had much success in the big leagues as a fifth-starter type, but I suppose he may be somewhat useful to the Pirates in the next year or two. His minor league strikeout rate isn’t great (7.4 K/9 innings), but he doesn’t walk a ton of players and his home run rate is quite low (0.5 homers/9 innings). That’s because he has a pretty good career groundball rate (~55% career) in the minors, which is presumably what Huntington sees in him and why he may be of some marginal value to the Pirates.
In any case, Lopez wasn’t going to be extremely valuable to the Pirates and he’d probably be a non-tender candidate over the winter. Now we get to see if Wil Ledezma’s great Triple-A numbers mean anything over the rest of 2010.
UPDATE: The Pirates are also getting John Bowker, who’s 27 and a career .318/.414/.561 hitter in Triple-A and a career .236/.285/.394 hitter in 513 big league PAs. He’d be a good guy to get some big league at-bats (now THIS is a guy I might consider working out a platoon for Milledge with), but I have no idea how he’ll get them with the team as currently configured. Huntington might be done making trades today, but he’s clearly got more coming in the future.
