I personally didn’t deem this one worthy of a post, but what the hell. The Reds acquired 27 year-old groundballer Kirk Saarloos for minor leaguer David Shafer. Saarloos will battle Matt Belisle and Homer Bailey for the fifth starter job. Bailey should prevent Saarloos from getting more than ten starts in ’07.
Shafer’s work at Double A equates to a tolerable relief performance in the bigs (something like a 3.50 ERA and 1.35 WHIP with a strong groundball rate).
Jim Callis of Baseball America offers his take on Saarloos and Shafer.
The weird thing is that I already had a category for Saarloos on this site. He was rumored in a Milton Bradley trade a year ago.
