What To Do With Marmol?

I’m only able to get to the Cubs blogs I really like these days about once a week unless someone posts a link, which I really appreciate (ccd, HP, Vlad, WV, and others). Vlad/Bob wrote a nice piece the other day wondering what the Cubs should do with the struggling Carlos Marmol. Marmol has had one ugly season with only a brief time in which he was any good at all. The Cubs have a couple of options about what to do with him, though. First, Marmol may very well have options left, in which case he could be sent down to Iowa to work out his control issues a little. Marmol does have 1 option left, but he has to clear optional assignment waivers due to his service time in the big leagues. This probably would be a problem even though the waiver would be revocable. If he clears optional assignment waivers he can be optioned to the minor leagues. If he does not clear they can revoke the waiver or trade him to the team that claimed him. They could also just let that team have him and take on his salary if they wanted, but Marmol isn’t making much money so that’s not going to happen. I don’t see the downside in doing this. He’s been really bad this season and the Cubs have to be asking themselves if he’s a part of their future bullpen at this point. If he doesn’t have a strong August and September I really don’t know how the Cubs can go into the 2010 season expecting Marmol to be anything other than a middle reliever you never want to use. The upside of placing him on waivers is that you could send him to the minor leagues to figure out his problems if he clears them or you could trade him for at least something if some team claims him. If the player is claimed and the team pulls him off waivers, they can’t put him on waivers again for 30 days and they would no longer have a revocable waiver for that player. If claimed at that point the Cubs would lose him. So the question really is whether or not the Cubs have already tried to pass him through optional assignment waivers. I’m guessing they probably have. I’m guessing he was claimed by some team. Why? Because there’s no reason for him to be on this roster at this time yet he still his. The only logical conclusion one can reach is that the Cubs already tried to pass him through waivers and it didn’t work. Imagine if you’re the Cardinals or Brewers and you’re in a division race with the Cubs who put someone like Marmol on optional waivers. You’d claim him. Why? Because you’d rather the Cubs keep him on the roster than be able to option him to the minors. It’s hard for me to believe that one of those teams would not have put in a claim just so the Cubs would have to keep him on the 25-man roster or lose him. If the Brewers had to pass Craig Counsell through optional waivers to option him (they can’t!), the Cubs and Cardinals would probably claim him. They wouldn’t do so because they want a player of that caliber, but because forcing the team you are in contention with to have him is a smart move. Second, the Cubs could basically do nothing. So far this seems to be Lou Piniella’s solution, given that he let Marmol close tonight and let him stay in the game even though he nearly coughed it up. Nothing this team has had happen to them or has done surprises me more than Lou’s tolerance with Marmol’s control problems. Lou is known for his short memory with relievers and we’ve seen how quickly he pulls the plug on a few valuable relief pitchers the Cubs could use. Lou is part of why the Cubs have a pile of suck in the bullpen right now. It’s even more confusing to look at what Marmol has done and compare it to Rich Hill who was given no rope by the same manager that continues to trot Marmol out time after time. It’s more odd when you look at a far superior pitcher like Rick Ankiel whose career as a pitcher ended because of the same thing, except that Ankiel’s control wasn’t as bad as Marmol’s. That brings me to option three. The first thing I would do is simply use him less. Right now he’s not helping the team very much. Let him get more work in on the side and work with Rothschild to figure out why his command is so bad. He just doesn’t have great control in the first place, so he’s always going to walk a lot of batters. But if he can’t start walking way fewer, there’s going to be less need for him. This is probably the only feasible option at this time. The Cubs probably can’t option him to the minors and if there’s no injury they can’t place him on the DL. I know there’s been a lot of DL shenanigans by Hendry, but the player has to agree to being put on the DL and why would Marmol do that when he’s going to be arbitration eligible after this season? This is also the best option because the Cubs are now in a position where they can more than likely afford to have him **** up every 4 or 5 days. The Cubs odds of reaching the playoffs are at 35% while the Cardinals nearly double that. Marmol is less important because winning games is less important. That sucks, but that is the reality of the situation. This does not mean that winning games is not important. Of course it is. 35% is still a decent number to have at this point in the season and it can change quickly with a few wins and Cardinals losses. That number doesn’t include the injury to Zambrano and the week or two of suck we’re probably going to see from Soto at the plate. What the Cubs eventually do with Carlos Marmol is going to depend on how he finishes the season. If he can return to just having terrible control then he’s sticking around. If his control doesn’t improve to terrible then the Cubs aren’t going to go into the 2010 season with Carlos Marmol in their bullpen. Perhaps that’s the wrong decision, but if you walk a batter per inning over an entire season in relief you don’t have much value to a team. You’re not a guy you can count on in any way whatsoever. One option that Vlad doesn’t mention with Marmol is something that Cubs fans haven’t wanted to see for one reason or another. Put him in the rotation. It’s obviously going to take some time stretching him out, but you’ve got 2 months in 2009, spring training and you can probably have him stretched out by May or June. People like to say that I don’t like prospects or that I give up on them too easily. I don’t think that’s true and I think Carlos Marmol is actually more than enough proof of that. In 2004 and 2005, Ryno and I would talk about Marmol like many talk about Josh Vitters and Andrew Cashner today. Angel Guzman obviously had more potential, but was often injured and Carlos Marmol’s stuff was as good as Carlos Zambrano’s. There were 2 out of 5 games in the 2006 season that I was excited to watch. I loved watching Zambrano pitch even if the team sucked. I also loved watching Carlos Marmol pitch in 2006. I was excited to his see him start like I am with Zambrano. The guy has ridiculously good stuff and if I recall, only Zambrano was more difficult to hit on that 2006 team than Carlos Marmol was. Control was his problem then like it is now. I didn’t agree with the Cubs moving him into the bullpen in 2007 and I still don’t agree with it. When you have a pitcher with the kind of stuff that Carlos Marmol has you get the most out of him. Yeah, his rookie season was pretty bad, but there are a lot of really good pitchers whose rookie seasons are embarrassing to look back on. The simple fact was that Carlos Marmol had more than enough talent and potential to remain the rotation, but the Cubs chose to move him to the bullpen. It was a bad decision at the time and it’s still a bad decision today. Will Marmol have improved his control enough to stick as a starter? I’m not sure his control is any more relevant as a starter than it is as a reliever. Those who say today that Marmol gets by because he’s so hard to hit should also believe he’d get by just fine as a starter. Like Vlad pointed out in his article, sometimes you stick with guys you know have done well in the past. I agree with that to an extent, but I tend to draw the line at 4+ months of suck by relief pitchers. Relievers are notoriously inconsistent, but Marmol hasn’t even been inconsistent this year. He’s consistently sucked since the Cubs season began. I take that back. He’s consistently sucked since the beginning of June, 2008. Since then he’s thrown 103.1 innings, walked a ridiculous 78 batters, hit an even more ridiculous 14 and has allowed 8 home runs. That’s a 4.54 FIP. For those counting at home, 4.45 FIP is about replacement level. The last 8 months in baseball, Carlos Marmol has been worse than a replacement level relief pitcher. A lot of people have said this year that people don’t hit home runs against Marmol because he’s so hard to hit. Then how did he allow 7 of them in 51.1 innings from the beginning of June through the end of the season last year? The answer is because home runs are more a result of fly ball or ground ball tendency than anything else. He’s allowed only 1 this year in 52 innings, but that’s going to go up. I’m well aware of how dangerous it can be to select the endpoints when discussing stats, but we’re at 8 baseball months of suck and counting. 6 and a half months of dominating relief pitching followed by 8 months of suck. His true talent is somewhere in between, but closer to the last 8 months than the first 6+ as a reliever. If this were any other player, Cubs fans would be calling for his head on a platter. Marmol was moved into the bullpen in September ‘06. Here is a graph of his FIP each month since then. I think that says enough. Somewhere along the line either the hitters made a big adjustment or Marmol just wasn’t as good as he was pitching. It’s probably a bit of both.