When I got on the Wellemeyer bandwagon–pretty early, I might add–I was not anticipating this. I was daydreaming about the possibility he would be this year’s Kiko Calero, or maybe even Al Reyes if he played his cards right. Now he is yet another major league reliever in the Cardinals’ starting rotation. I have to imagine that Kip Wells is going to feel pretty left out during conversations.

To be honest, if it were the beginning of the season, or if the Cardinals didn’t already have Brad Thompson stretching out in the rotation, I wouldn’t be all that disturbed by this. Wellemeyer put up some solid minor league numbers, all of them in the rotation. His career home run rate outside the show is an outstanding 0.68 per nine innings, which bodes well, and his control problems weren’t nearly so pronounced. Could it be that, as I postulated with Thompson, the control issues come from an inability to pitch in relief? Sure, maybe. Results with Wonderbrad have been mixed, but there’s nothing in Wellemeyer’s minor league pedigree to suggest he’ll do much worse.

Minor Leagues   H/9   K/9  BB/9  HR/9  K:BB
WonderBrad     8.28  6.64  1.56  0.63  4.27
Todd Terrific  8.55  9.55  3.97  0.68  2.40

One more thing: I’ve noticed a lot of people talking about the straightness of Wellemeyer’s fastball, and wondering aloud how many home runs he’ll give up in Coors Field. The stats just don’t bear this out. His home run rate is pretty low. (His fastball looks pretty good to me, incidentally; straight, maybe, but he locates it very well for a guy with bad control.)

So, devoid of context, this isn’t a bad move. It might even be a good move; the Cardinals seem to be making a concerted effort to exploit a market inefficiency, Moneyball style, by putting players long pigeonholed as relievers into the rotation, where they’re much more valuable. After all, if your scout sees starter makeup in him, why keep him in the pen on the word of some other scout, who saw him when he was in AAA and decided he didn’t have enough pitches, or height, or whatever?

But the problem is who’s going out of the rotation. Wainwright’s going to be fine, but at this point one has to wonder if it really is the way the Cardinals have handled him that’ve contributed to Reyes’s lack of consistent success. Barring a complete meltdown or continued bad command in the PCL, if Reyes is gone longer than a month the Cardinals will be making a huge mistake, and doing it to one of their most valuable assets.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m not convinced Wellemeyer is even the best candidate in the bullpen for the Dave Duncan Starter Plan. When Tyler Johnson was a 21-year-old in A ball, he did this in the starting rotation:

 W  L   ERA   G     IP   H  ER  HR  BB   K  K/9  K:BB  HR/9
15  3  2.00  22  121.1  96  27   7  42 132 9.79  3.14  0.52

Yeah. Then he made ten starts in Palm Beach the following year, and then he was moved to the bullpen. What? Were the 2003 Cardinals really so pitching rich as to not need to watch a guy with a big strikeout rate develop? The move was, apparently, designed to see if his command would improve in a relief role. It obviously didn’t make a difference, since we’ve seen Johnson struggle to locate his fastball (which hasn’t really gained any velocity) as much as he ever did in the minors. With Troy Cate in the bigs as a third lefty reliever, wouldn’t it make some sense to see if a guy with one of the best pitches in the major leagues could go five innings?

Something to consider.

Are you ready for Skippy Schumaker and So Taguchi, sharing a roster? Probably even an outfield, before Jed and Juancar get back? I’m ready like I was ready to watch the venereal disease slideshow during middle school sex education: if all else fails I can just close my eyes, or join the priesthood.

That said, Juan’s absence does mean that John Rodriguez will get a fair shake in the outfield. It got him to the big leagues, but does anyone else get the impression that J-Rod’s ridiculous 2005 performance in Memphis–seventeen home runs in 120 at-bats–has kept him from holding down a big league job? .434 isn’t a good slugging percentage from a corner outfielder, but it’s not very far below what we should be expecting from him. Aside from that stretch as the PCL’s Babe Ruth, his career high slugging percentage is .542, and that came in a year where he hit ten triples in addition to his sixteen home runs.

That, combined with his propensity for a lot of long, long fly balls, has led to him being cast as an underachiever. He’s been labelled a home run hitter who doesn’t hit home runs, when he’s better thought of as the player managers seem to think Timo Perez used to be.

There’s another hobbyhorse of mine in that article, though, did you catch it? Tyler Johnson, Last of the One-Pitch Pitchers, is trying to learn the sinker, and he thinks that might have to do with his terrible spring. His terrible spring, in turn, has something to do with Ricardo F. Rincon getting back into the race for the twenty-five man roster.

Seriously? Is there any problem Dave Duncan hasn’t tried to solve with the sinker? I have it from good sources that he’s gotten in contact with Hamid Karzai about keeping the ball down in the zone. Tyler Johnson’s problem is not that he elevates the ball, it’s that he walks six batters per nine innings. Specialist pitchers with giant, loopy sliders tend to have that problem. Teaching him a new pitch that he has trouble controlling that’s designed to lower his strikeout rate–his main advantage as a pitcher–is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. I know I talked about giving Dunc a lifetime pass, but Braden Looper hasn’t panned out yet.