In the early years of the Neal Huntington era, Huntington would fill the roster with pitchers like Tyler Yates and Franquelis Osoria and take shots at pitchers like Kevin Hart and Donnie Veal. Occasionally he’d unearth a diamond in the rough like Evan Meek or hit it big on a trade with a pitcher like James McDonald, but mostly the roster was filled with hard-throwing crap that couldn’t throw strikes or get enough outs to justify a continued Major League existence.
I don’t know what’s changed in the intervening years. Ray Searage took over as pitching coach in 2011 and that was the season in which the first Searage/Jim Benedict project (Charlie Morton) showed noticeable results. Things have very much turned around since then. It’s also very possible that in addition to that, Huntington’s failures with pitchers gave him and his analytics team the necessary criteria to find pitchers more likely to turn around — this is more or less how you go about completing a PhD project in the sciences.
Whatever the case, it’s no longer possible to look at a pitcher claimed by the Pirates off of waivers or a non-roster invite to camp and immediately dismiss him. Five weeks ago, Arquimedes Caminero was just a name, a strikeout rate, and a walk rate. He was out of options and it was relatively easy to determine that he threw hard. Couple that with a shrug and a joke about screwballs, and that was the Arquimedes Caminero acquisition.
It’s March 11th now, and suddenly everyone is trying to fit nine names into a seven-spot bullpen because Caminero is blowing fastballs past people in Florida. Obviously Spring Training success doesn’t portend regular season success and obviously the Pirates don’t have a 100% hit rate on pitchers like this, but the speed with which guys like Caminero and John Holdzkom insert themselves into the bullpen conversation is pretty impressive to me. The Pirates know what they’re looking for, and when they find it they know how to get pitchers back on the right track.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words.
Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
