The Pirates made a few roster moves today, 2 expected and 2 unexpected. First what we already knew about. Yesterday’s starter Daniel McCutchen was optioned to AAA in order to make room on the 25 man roster for reliever Joel Hanrahan. McCutchen struggled yesterday, but this was going to happen regardless since the team has 2 off days coming up and can therefore go with just 4 starters for the next 2 weeks or so.
In addition, in an unexpected move the team has DFA’d Hayden Penn to make room on the 25 and 40 man rosters for Brian Burress, who will start tonight in place of Ross Ohlendorf. Ohlendorf has been scratched due to back spasms, but the team thinks he will be ready for his next start. All of this, and much more detail can be found in here in MLB.com beat writer Jen Langosch’s post about the subject.
Penn was hardly with the team for long enough to know his name, he was claimed off waivers during the last week of Spring Training, and he struggled in 3 appearances to the tune of 30.86 ERA. I’m curious why the team picked Burress to start (without looking closely at the AAA rotation, my guess is he may have been the only option available), but his stats are far from impressive and I’m not expecting much from him. Let’s just hope he can keep the team in the game tonight and that Ohlendorf isn’t out for more than 1 start.
EDIT: Jen Langosch has the reasoning for why Burress was the one called up in her game preview post. Basically, due to an obscure MLB rule, at this early point in the season guys already on the 40 man can’t be called up without placing someone on the DL. The Bucs aren’t ready to put Ohlendorf on the DL, so that rules out Veal, Hart, Lincoln, and Jakubauskas. Burress was scheduled to start tonight for Indy anyway, so giving him the call made the most sense.
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