Roster Moves and the Bullpen

The Pirates sent down Kyle McPherson and Justin Wilson just a day after they were both called up (and pitched three scoreless innings) in favor of Chad Qualls and Daniel McCutchen. That made a lot of Pirates fans and bloggers angry, just for the fact that the Pirates have at least a few guys that are better pitchers in AAA. Wilson, for one, showed his stuff last night with three strikeouts in one inning. Also, Bryan Morris is having a very nice season in the Indy bullpen and looks like he's developing into a back of the bullpen type pitcher.

Despite that, the Pirates went with Qualls and McCutchen, who have both struggled for long periods of this 2012 season. The reasoning for such a move is probably that the Pirates aren't comfortable having Morris and Wilson have their first big league stints come in the middle of a pennant race. Also, Wilson has been a starter for this whole season and shifting him to the bullpen in a big league role might come with some complications.

So was it the right move? Would the Pirates have been better off taking some risks on unproven guys with better arms? Or are they better off with more experienced guys that have at least pitched in the big leagues before? I don't know the answer to that If it were up to me, I definitely would have had Morris up a few weeks ago. I can understand keeping Wilson in AAA (Rob Biertempfel makes some great points about that here), but it doesn't make much sense that they wouldn't give Morris a shot right now.

Time will tell if this was a good or bad move, but for now it's being scrutinized quite a bit.

The team has had a lot of changeover recently with a bunch of unfortunate things happening. Hopefully things should settle down here with Neil Walker and Travis Snider back in the lineup and Jordy Mercer coming back shortly. The one thing we do know is that the Pirates had better start winning at a pretty good rate, because if things keep up how they are right now, this team doesn't have a very good shot at making the playoffs.