Yuku free message boards

There's no such thing as a AAAA player. That's an incredibly old institutional bias with next to no basis in reality. It's a product of knee-jerk reactions to small sample size successes and failures. Think of the concept of a sophomore slump. That's the converse myth, and it comes from overreacting to one season's worth of MLB rookie success. A guy like Pat Listach winds up having a much longer MLB career than he should've had simply because he was lucky enough to have a fluky good year as a rookie, and that impression sticks.

Properly adjusted for context, numbers from the high minors are every bit as useful for projecting future performance as actual major league numbers. Swindle and DiFelice miss tons of bats and don't walk anybody, and they will do that whether they pitch in AAA or MLB this year.

Morlan isn't better than Coffey, Julio, or Gagne right now, but he also might not be that much worse, and if they can find a way to keep him up, they get to send him back down and get 5 more cost-controlled years of a high upside player. Besides, the way that long relievers tend to be deployed these days, somebody on the staff is going to have the job of pitching three innings every time the team is getting slaughtered. It's an incredibly stupid way to define a bullpen role, but the upshot is that there is always room to have exactly one truly terrible pitcher on your staff who will never get the chance to effect the outcome of any games. That's the only silver lining. Morlan could do that job as well as anybody, since there's really no way to screw it up.