With Opening Day hurtling towards us at an alarming speed, the Pirates have finalized their bullpen one day after giving Juan Nicasio the final rotation spot. The obvious spots are filled by the obvious pitchers (Melancon, Watson, Caminero), and with Jared Hughes on the disabled list, the final four spots will go to Neftali Feliz, Ryan Vogelsong, Cory Luebke, and Kyle Lobstein.
None of this should actually be unexpected after the Pirates put Hughes on the DL and traded Eric O’Flaherty earlier in the week. Luebke’s spring training ERA was not impressive (7.94), but he had a pretty strong K/BB rate and was pretty impressive when I saw him in Bradenton right before I left a couple of weeks ago. “Impressive,” is a relative term during spring training, of course. What I mean is that he was throwing hard enough that the pop of the glove made an obvious impression on the people in the stands, which is pretty much all you have to go on at McKechnie (no radar gun in the spring games) unless you’ve made friends with a scout behind home plate (I made friends with a beer vendor, instead). The Pirates need another lefty and were going to have to draw from the O’Flaherty/Luebke pool for him; O’Flaherty pitched a little better in camp, but his recent numbers are not good and if the Pirates saw more in Luebke behind the scenes, I have no problems with this decsion.
Lobstein, meanwhile, has been impressive this spring, but I can’t figure out what the Pirates think his role in the bullpen might be. I’ve been trying to get a handle on Lobstein all winter; I saw that Tigers fans were disappointed when they DFA’d him, but I couldn’t figure out why. His numbers aren’t great, and his stuff isn’t overwhelming. He has been awfully tough on lefties in his brief big league career and he might work as a swingman, but he’s primarily worked as a starter in the past. It’s possible his stuff plays up in an unexpected way out of the bullpen and I’m not sure there were more obvious options than him to fill Hughes’ spot, but I’m not all that confident he’ll be a useful big league reliever.
Feliz, I’m not really concerned about for all of the reasons we discussed when the Pirates signed him. His fastball came back last year, his K/BB numbers looked pretty good with the Tigers, and he feels like an obvious Ray Searage project. Vogelsong is Vogelsong; maybe he can have a Joe Blanton resurgence in the bullpen, but probably not (but maybe! his velocity did bounce back up a bit last year after a dip over several years prior).
I will freely admit that the Pirates have hit on a ton of off-the-radar bullpen guys in the past several years (literally every single one of Melancon, Watson, Caminero, and Hughes is a failed minor league starter non-prospect or a cast off), but I’m still nervous to see more than half of the bullpen occupied by Lobstein, Vogelsong, Feliz, and Luebke when more than half of the rotation is Niese, Nicasio, and Locke. It’s not that I don’t trust the Pirates to build a pitching staff or that I think all of these guys will be disasters, it’s just that I’m nervous. Maybe even really nervous.
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