Originally Posted by
mth123
I don't think these small samples you are quoting mean as much as what the collective wisdom of the people who do this for a living mean at this point.
In Warren's case, he had many years where all 30 teams in baseball could have nabbed him and put him in their big league pen. The fact that nobody did and at 29 he's still trying to establish himself as a big leaguer tells me more than 50 or 60 big league innings. Heck it tells me more than 250 big league innings. You can try to evaluate these small samples and draw a conclusion if you want. We all can. My conclusion is he's worth a shot in a low leverage role and would need a lot of successful innings in the big leagues before moving him into the high leverage role that the Reds gave him by default. I hope he rights the ship and is a huge asset for the reds, but if you are planning the bullpen around a guy like this the way the Reds are, I think it explains why the pen has struggled. You asked the question "underperformance or lack of talent?" When you have to plan around a 29 year old who hasn't established himself as a big leaguer as one of your key set-up men the way the Reds are, I think that indicates that they don't have enough talent in the pen to be successful. It doesn't mean Warren can't beat the odds, I hope he does, but if that is how you are planning the pen, then the pen is short on talent and that is the answer to your question.
In Moreta's case, whether you like it or not, when teams bring these young players in, they evaluate them and the ones they think have the most potential go into the minor league rotations and the rest fill roles in the bullpen. There are exceptions, usually guys drafted as a reliever who are promoted quickly through the organization and are in the big leagues very quickly (Brandon Finnegan, K-Rod, and Ryan Wagner are examples). Moreta isn't one of those and wasn't a minor league starter, so the Reds already determined he was a longer shot to be successful than somebody like Santillan or Vlad. And again, that is more information than what you are reading in the stat lines. Minor league relievers are also subject to very deceiving stats. Relievers are situational guys who accumulate their stats by being brought into the game in favorable situations where they are more likely to be successful and because of the lower innings overall that relievers pitch, those stats can be very deceiving, so I place more weight on the fact that the Reds never deemed him worthy of a shot as a starter than anything those skewed minor league stats say. Again, it doesn't mean he can't be successful, but the fact that he seems solidly in the pen at this point (at least until yesterday) rather than in more of a lottery ticket role as a mop up guy is another indication that the Reds were short on overall talent to be successful which speaks directly to the question you asked in this thread.
Does it mean Santillan is a sure thing? Nope. He's looking shaky as well, but he's not 29 and been passed over multiple times and he was a starter whose stats are more informative because there are more innings involved and they weren't accumulated through hand-picked situations. The Reds deemed him worthy of developing as a starter so that indicates they had higher hopes for him from the beginning and has generally been a more highly regarded prospect than Warren or Moreta, so yes, he gets more rope. But, to answer your question, he's still an unproven rookie and the fact that he was deemed a key guy in the plan for the late innings is another indication that the pen overall is performing poorly because of a lack of overall talent. If they had the talent as a pen to be successful, these guys wouldn't be in such key roles from the beginning and would have to earn those roles through a lot more innings of solid big league performance than any of them have shown.
So that's my answer and I don't care what you reject or accept.