Padres right-hander Marcos Mateo took a physical for the Hanshin Tigers of Japana’s Nippon Professional Baseball today, reports Dennis Lin of the San Diego Union-Tribune (links to Twitter). If everything checks out, Mateo will likely sign a contract with Hanshin, who would presumably send cash to the Padres in exchange for releasing Mateo, Lin adds.
Mateo, a former Cubs prospect, saw 44 2/3 innings with Chicago from 2010-11 and didn’t play in the Major Leagues until last season with the Padres. With San Diego, Mateo pitched 27 innings with a 4.00 ERA and 33 strikeouts against eight unintentional walks. Over the past three years between Triple-A, the Dominican Winter League and the Padres, Mateo has been outstanding, averaging well over 10 strikeouts per nine innings and yielding a combined 2.53 ERA across that variety of leagues. Mateo is primarily a fly-ball pitcher — 34.8 percent ground-ball rate in 2015 — that averaged 94.2 mph on his fastball during his most recent stint with the Padres.
Subtracting Mateo from the roster will thin out what currently projects to be a crowded bullpen scene, particularly in terms of right-handed pitchers. In addition to Mateo, San Diego has righties Odrisamer Despaigne, Kevin Quackenbush, Nick Vincent, Brandon Maurer, Cesar Vargas, Cory Mazzoni and Jon Edwards. The club also has three right-handers — Luis Perdomo, Blake Smith and Josh Martin — that it selected in the Rule 5 Draft. While each might be an unlikely candidate to stick with the Padres, they’ll be in camp competing for jobs nonetheless, and if one name particularly intrigues the Padres, they’ll have to keep him on the roster or risk losing him to waivers before offering him back to his former team.
Mateo has good stuff but a big park like petco it should have worked
A lot of relivers have played terrible in Petco and were good with other teams after. Just shows how horrible the Padres organization is.
Makes those 3 rule 5 pitchers have a somewhat better chance
they need to cut Despaigne from roster
With 10 right-handed pen guys, and ~5 spots available, there will definitely be some player shuffling going on.
Obviously, the three guys selected from the Rule 5 draft have to stick, or otherwise they will have to pass through waivers, return back to their club, or the Padres can work out a trade to keep them in their organization…So, even if Perdomo, Smith, and/or Martin do not make the opening day roster, that does not necessarily mean it is a foregone conclusion that they will not still be within the organization.
The Rule 5 draft is an aspect of the MLB that, in my opinion, actually does a pretty solid job of evening out talent across the league.
Now, I’m not saying by any means that it truly levels the playing field for teams, but it does allow some teams with less depth and talent to relatively cherry pick decent to quality talent from other teams that have an excess of talented players.
Several quality arms and position players have been selected throughout the Rule 5’s draft history, and it will certainly be interesting to follow which teams picked up some quality pieces this year.
With three selections, the Padres stand a decent chance of having one of those pitchers turn into a useful bullpen piece. If so, they would become just the latest team to improve their roster through the Rule 5 draft.
I’m not sure who was behind actually created and implementing the draft, but from past and present results it has definitely accomplished its original goals set out, has been quite the success, and it has turned into a very useful tool for GM’s to acquire talent.