A few have mentioned how a mistake was made by paying off the Marlins to accept Nate Robertson and keeping Dontrelle.....he has "won" 4 games thus far (against 4 losses) and sports a 4.30 ERA.
That pretty much ends the positives however. He's striking out fewer batters then even his career mark and he's walking more. His groundball percentage is down as well. (For those familiar w/"FIP", that's around 5. This is where his ERA "should" be)
Nate is benefiting from pitching in the weaker league, pitching to pitchers, and pitching in a cavernous park. I'm hopeful he has the appearance of a "good" season as I've always liked Nate very much....and I would have been fine with keeping him for one more spin if the Tigers had gone that route....but I don't miss him much and I don't think he would have held up nearly as well in the American League as he is thus far in the NL. I don't think it was a "mistake" to opt for Dontrelle this Spring. They felt Dontrelle had more of the coveted "upside" if he could harness his stuff....judging by a couple of Dontrelle's solid outings that was probably true...but he just couldn't sustain anything so a move was made.
Getting out from under the morass of poor contracts given out in the '07/'08 timeframe is going to take some time...slowly but surely they whittle away and hopefully DD has changed his approach moving forward.
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