The Pirates announced tonight that they acquired Joe Blanton from the Royals for cash. Blanton was designated for assignment earlier this week when the Royals acquired Ben Zobrist.
It’s late and I’d rather go to bed than dig through Blanton’s Baseball-Reference page (I was honestly just laying in bed, updating Twitter on my iPad and laughing at the Mets at this point), but my hunch is that the Pirates intend to put Blanton in the Deolis Guerra role multi-inning relief role, where he can eat up innings and possibly give the Pirates a bit of much-needed starting depth, since their depth currently consists of Vance Worley and Radhames Liz.
If you ignore Blanton’s high home run rate, his 2015 peripherals look about as good as they’ve ever looked. His fastball velocity is up a tick and he’s striking out a decent amount of hitters, and his ground balls are up some, too, despite that home run rate (which is why his xFIP at 3.07 is much lower than his FIP). I’m not trying to make a case here that Joe Blanton is a great pitcher or that the Pirates should only acquire Joe Blanton at this deadline; just that they’ve upgraded the last pitcher out of the bullpen a bit and that Blanton has been OK this year, to the point that he’s probably a little bit better than you realize (I’m projecting that onto you, dear reader, because my initial headline to this piece was, ‘Pirates Acquire Joe Blanton, for some reason,’ but after a quick look at his numbers, I can at least understand why they’d want him in the back of the bullpen). It’s not an exciting move, but at least it’s a functional one.
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