Monday, December 7, 2009

Sloth Love Chunk!

The Nationals traded a player to be named later for Yankees reliever Brian Bruney. Here's the quick skinny (pun intended).

Bruney is fat, has had injury issues each of the last two years, and has a walked 13.1% of the batters he faced in 2009, which is worse than Zach Segovia (12.8%) but not quite as bad as Wil Ledezma (13.3%). He also strikes out a decent number of guys, and has pitched in some pressure packed situations, posting a leverage index over 1.0 in 34 innings in 2008. Bill Ladson says he'll be a set-up man.

Bruney was a Rizzo draft pick in 2000, so either Mike knows more about him than anyone else, or we're seeing him turn the Cincinnati Nationals into the Washington Diamondbacks.

Bruney also grew up in Astoria, Oregon, the town where Goonies was filmed, so he shall hereafter be known as "Chunk."
  • Update: The PTBNL is the first overall pick in the Rule 5 draft (interesting--I didn't realize that you could do this to in essence trade rule 5 picks). And the Nationals cut Saul Rivera to make room for Bruney. Big thumbs down on this one. Rivera is probably better than Bruney anyway, and certainly I don't think that Bruney is better than every rule 5 eligible player in all of baseball.

6 comments:

estuartj said...

If relievers are "Fungible" assets should we call trades like the #nats getting Bruney "Funging"?

Harper said...

Did you learn nothing from the "Dutch" debacle? Bruney will only be called by his imaginative in-game nickname of "Brunes"

Anonymous said...

Saul Rivera is not close to being better than Bruney. Bruney posted a 3.25 ERA in 4 years in the AL East playing in a HR friendly park. Rivera is washed up garbage at this point. He doesn't fit on this team.

Steven said...

Boy there are a lot of things wrong in one comment. First, the old Yankee Stadium didn't really qualify as that much of a HR-friendly park. For lefties, yeah, but overall not so much. In fact in 2008, it slightly favored pitchers.

Yes, it's true he had a major-league 3.25 ERA. But he threw just 20.2, 34.1, 50, and 39 innings. Those are very small sample sizes. Over that same time period he had a minor-league ERA of 5.61 rookie ball, AA, and AAA.

And there were so many partial innings in both his minor leagues and major leagues that ERA is a lousy metric anyway.

He had a 1.40 WHIP, 5.7 BB/9, and xFIPs of 4.89, 6.16, 4.34, and 5.15.

You may be right about Rivera, but Bruney is terrible.

Steven said...

@estuartj--after watching the 2009 Nationals, do you really still think relievers are all "fungible?"

Rick said...

Good trade I believe. Rivera isn't that bad and will definitely still find a place. Thanks for sharing. By the way, Premio Foods is one great company who has free goodies and recipes to cool sports fans out there. Enjoy!