DJ Carrasco has agreed to a minor league deal with the Pirates tonight that will be worth between $950,000 and $1.2 million (with incentives) if he makes the big league club (originally reported by ESPN Chicago, the detail about it being a minor league deal reported by DK).
Carrasco’s coming off of a pretty decent season with the White Sox where he worked out of a Jeff Karstens-type long reliever role. He gets a pretty good amount of ground balls (his career rate is over 50%), and all of his projections for 2010 look pretty solid (see his Fangraphs page). He’s not quite in the Neal Huntington Reliever Mold in that his fastball clocks in in the low 90s (he mixes in a cutter, slider, and curve with that fastball) and his strikeout rate isn’t that high, but his K/BB ratio has been over two in his two years with the White Sox and since he gets all those groundballs it shouldn’t be a problem.
In fact, it’d really be pretty surprising to me if he doesn’t make the club. He’ll make a solid addition to the bullpen if he does.
