The Cubs have re-signed lefty Clayton Richard, Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune was among those to report (Twitter links). He’ll take the place of righty Rafael Soriano, who hits the DL with right shoulder inflammation.
After recently being designated for assignment, Richard declined an outright assignment and elected free agency. Obviously it did not take long for his most recent club to bring him back, however, on a new deal.
The 31-year-old has pitched to a 4.29 ERA in 21 frames with the Cubs over three starts and one relief appearance. He’s retired nine batters by strikeout and allowed five walks in that span.
Richard came to the Cubs after throwing well early in the year at Triple-A for the Pirates. A provision in his deal required Pittsburgh either to add him to its active roster or make him available to another team willing to do so, and Chicago came calling. After once being designated off of the Cubs’ 40-man roster and optioned, Richard went through the more traditional DFA process this time around before re-signing.
Well.
I do not recall a player having a journey quite like this in one season. Crazy.
I do hope he remains on the roster, as I think he will provide value down the stretch.
Cubs also were involved with Gillespie’s journey. He played in what, 4 different organizations from 13-14.
The Cubs sure do shuffle the deck quite a bit.
Needs a bit more shuffling. How about Baez up and one of the relievers down. Need a much stronger bench and when they add Montero & LaStella possibly this week they still need more non pitchers on the 25 man.
They seem to want to take it really slow with Baez and his new approach. They may feel that if he comes up and flails again his value will be almost zero similar to Castro. As of now I still believe the best team the Cubs can field is Bryant, Russell, Baez, Rizzo with Schwarber platooning with Denorfia and Soler platooning with Coghlan. But I think they are right in taking it slow with Baez. Video of him post-DL look very promising, but he still strikes out a lot. The mixing in of his newer swing (no/less leg kick) has a lot of people excited in that maybe he has learned how to make adjustments from pitch to pitch an AB to AB.
Man, I’d basically forgotten about LaStella. Too bad too, he could back up at second, third and I assume he could fill in at first as well — basically filling Herrera’s role with hopefully more impressive results.