FanPost

obscure relief pitchers of interest: callups edition: stephen pryor, elvin ramirez

maybe i can even do two guys at once. kick it up a notch.

stephen pryor

pryor's not quite as obscure as some of these guys because he managed to get the Official Relief Prospect label somehow. i'm never sure exactly how that works. it seems almost random. i guess maybe throwing 100mph helps. pryor does that. it's not clear what else he does, but maybe it doesn't matter. already pitched a couple times, his ML debut yesterday and again today (sunday). so far he gave up a homer on a slider in between striking out a bunch of guys with the fastball. trend starting to emerge.

dr. detecto over at seattle sports insider, one of my favorite obscure bloggers of interest, has an entertaining-as-always series of pryor writeups which is way better than anything i've got right now, so go read those and come back.

contextual factors: the mariners pen is word salad right now. league is out, nobody knows for how long, and it's hard to say who's in. wilhelmsen is the theory, but they haven't really had a save situation arise to test the theory. all the other guys have come out first in non-save situations, which is all the clue we have. iwakuma's gotten 2 saves in 3 days, which probably already sent all the 13-year-olds scampering to the wire for him in 12-team yahoo leagues, but one of those was a 12th inning save after everybody else had already pitched and the other one was a three-inning save in that 21-8 opposite-day blowout of the rangers. delabar was supposed to be a factor but he got demoted for pryor.

so wilhelmsen is probably the guy, for the moment, and he's looked strong lately. and at any rate they were always going to give pryor some kind of a trial period. but if closing his eyes and pumping that fastball in the general direction of the catcher's torso seven out of eight pitches works as well as it seems like it might, general principles of bullpen buoyancy ought to float him into the saves-holds rich mixture inside of a month or so. shawn kelley? no. bottom line, use your head about your league and team situation, but as a general piece of advice, get pryor if you have room. fastballs: why not.

elvin ramirez

real talk, i had never even heard of this dude until i started crossposting all this stuff about obscure relief pitchers of interest over on minorleagueball last week and the mets fans threw his name at me. but that makes him obscure, and you know how i feel about obscure relief pitchers. he got called up within hours of my hearing his name, around the same time as pryor.

all i really have on him is two things: numbers, and the fact that he got rule 5'd by the nats last year but sat out the entire season injured, had some kind of shoulder surgery and eventually got returned to sender.

the numbers look very nice, as they usually do in these cases. he's got about 14 innings each at AA and AAA this year, with an identical 11 K/9 at each stop. that's a bump up from his old rates before he missed 2011 injured. before that he was a 6-8 K/9 guy in A-ball with bad walk rates. his AA walk rate was also bad, but then he didn't walk barely anyone in AAA. so i'd keep an eye on the walks, because the AAA sample is meaninglessly small. everything else looks good though, and from whatever thumbnail sketch scouting reports it sounds like the arm's good.

things in the mets pen aren't quite as crazy as they are in seattle, at the moment. frank-frank likes to keep it interesting but it doesn't feel like he's losing the big job any time soon, and there's a variety of other bodies hanging around. but it does feel like there's some room for opportunity here if elvin can keep his AAA ball rolling.

there was a wild rumor for a few minutes that elvin had joined mike baxter as casualties of johan's no-hitter with the dreaded Celebration Injury, but it turned out to be a mistaken identity thing; that was actually ramon ramirez, not elvin. Wrong Ramirez. so instead of heading to the DL without even making his debut, elvin's already moved up a slot. looks like he took advantage of the confusion to coldcock ramon's elbow in the middle of the pile. he should go far.

(crossposted from wily motown)

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