The Brewers have designated right-hander Brandon Kintzler for assignment, the club announced on Twitter. In a corresponding move, the Brew Crew selected the contract of utilityman Elian Herrera from Triple-A.
Kintzler has spent much of this young season on the minor league disabled list with a finger injury. The righty has posted a 3.26 ERA, 57.3% ground ball rate and 6.6 K/9 over 174 career innings (all out of the bullpen) with Milwaukee since 2010. As you might suspect, that high grounder rate and low strikeout total has led to some variance between his ERA and advanced metrics, such as last season when he posted a 3.24 ERA but a 4.68 FIP, 3.87 xFIP and 3.71 SIERA. Kintzler has displayed reverse-splits tendencies over his career, as right-handed batters have a .733 OPS against him while left-handed hitters have only managed a .624 OPS.
Kintzler was arbitration-eligible for the first time this winter, and he avoided arbitration by agreeing to a one-year, $1.075MM deal with the Brewers. He joins Grant Balfour (Rays), Gary Brown (Cardinals), Xavier Cedeno (Nationals), Kyle Drabek (White Sox) and Todd Redmond (Blue Jays) in “DFA limbo” according to the MLBTR DFA Tracker.
This is a surprising DFA. He’s not a shut down reliever by any means, but he was pretty good the past two seasons. He is definitely one of the best 210 relievers in the game, so someone should claim him.
Does it really matter,? The season is already over, 11 games in, last year’s collapse continues. It may be time for a major re-org and moving tradeable assets…Lohse,Garza,Lind,Rodriguez,Broxton,Smith,Fiers.and yes even Gomez unfortunately,
The farm system has been dormant for too long, it’s time to start the painful rebuild.
Wow, that seems a tad hasty after 11 games. You do realize that they aren’t playing a 16 game NFL schedule this year, right?
No Kintzler’s ERA was good last season due to other Relief pitchers getting outs for him to finish an inning. Something that also helped as he failed to do quite often for runners he wasn’t responsible for. 2013 good yes. 2014 terrible. 2015 doubtful he’ll ever see Major League playing time again. AAA player at best for the rest of his career.