Nats fans got their wish yesterday -- well, at least part of it.
Danny Cabrera, the Scourge of Southeast, was taken out of the rotation. Huzzah! Huzzah!
While there's a contingent of Nats fans that had hoped to personally mop the hot tar onto his body, and rip open the feather pillows before floating him down the Potomac to some faraway destination, D-Cab was not removed from the roster.
So that means? Gulp. Yes. It means what you're thinking.
Danny's heading off to the pen. Yes, the team thinks that adding the Nats most ineffective starter (well, now that Olsen's out of the rotation, at least) to the pen helps the team.
But you know what? It's just crazy enough that it might work.
Cabrera's all kinds of terrible this year, but he's been really effective against right-handed batters. Righties have just a .203 batting average against him. And they're slugging .281.
The best way of looking at that is that Cabrera turns every right-handed batter into Shairon Martis.
Perhaps in the pen, he'll be able to rear back a bit and throw harder, too. More oomph should lead to more Ks. (And on average, a starter who goes to the bullpen has their ERA drop by roughly 3/4 of a run.)
Cabrera's not suddenly going to make anyone forget what Chad Cordero did in 2005. And there's entirely a chance that he's going to stink up the park, sending a dark cloud of suck floating over the city.
But he was already doing that in the rotation. What do the Nats have to lose? It's not like they're winning these games anyway.
Chris Needham used to write Capitol Punishment. He wonders if a rift in space-time would open up were Hanrahan and Cabrera to pitch against each other.
