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Originally Posted by duncan_idaho
All good points.
Re: his slider, he throws kind of a slurve now. It's a more looping breaking ball. If he could tighten that up AND throw both variations it nudges his profile up. You do really have to have that tight, darting slider to get lefties out down and in, for sure.
If he doesn't really fix it, I still think he can be successful with his current mix, just makes it harder to hit a #3 ceiling.
I think it's pretty likely he's a solid back end guy who can give you 5 or 6 innings consistently. And that's fine/useful. Lynch, Lacy, and Kowar are the "high upside" guys in this farm and most likely to give you a 1 or 2 starter.
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And what's lost a lot of the time is that you don't NEED 5 aces. Oh sure, they're nice - but they're not vital.
A 'typical' rotation can do the job. If one of your potential aces turns into a true 200 inning, 140+ ERA+ kind of 'hand the ball in game 1' guys, you're fine if you have a solid #2 and even a handful of #4 guys behind them.
If you have 3 dudes w/ genuine ace potential - yeah, maybe one of 'em hits. Cardinals thought they had that with Reyes, Flaherty and Weaver - one of 'em turned into that guy, one of 'em is probably going to wash out and the other fell somewhere in the middle. That's pretty standard.
So if you have a handful of depth guys behind them that can develop and eventually give you 7 quality arms going into any given season who can start games and give you a roughly league average performance? That's good enough.
Rotation depth is just overlooked a lot of the time. Having a couple spare guys you can trust to throw you 6 quality innings is probably more important than having a guy develop into a '#2 starter' instead of a back of the rotation guy. It's a looooooong season and if you can go out there day after day after day without effectively giving away an L (especially in July/August when attrition has invariably set in), you're ahead of most squads.