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Read this, take a deep breath, and then read it again.
carlos marmol agrees to minor-league deal with #reds
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) May 27, 2014
That's right. The Cincinnati Reds, owners of the worst bullpen ERA in the National League, just signed Carlos Marmol to a minor league deal. That's the same Carlos Marmol who was recently released by the Florida Marlins after having roughly the same start to the 2014 season as J.J. Hoover & Sean Marshall.
And here I was, all this time, thinking that the Reds actually liked Corky Miller and his knees. Poor guy's going to get beat up trying to catch Marmol for the next month.
The funny thing about Marmol - aside from almost everything about Marmol - is that there was actually a time when he was really, really, ridiculously good at pitching. From 2007 to 2010, he struck out 441 batters over 308.1 innings, posting an ERA+ of 176 and a WHIP of just 1.15, and it could have been argued that the one-time All Star was one of the very, very elite relief pitchers in all of Major League Baseball.
But he was a Cub, and as we all know, the Chicago Cubs aren't allowed to have nice things, lest they break them and botch the re-gluing. Marmol rapidly descended from "season that was way too good to be produced by a Cub" to "pitcher the Cubs couldn't trade if they wanted to" before he was finally unloaded onto the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for Matt Guerrier in early July of 2013.
If you look up Carlos Marmol on FanGraphs, you'll notice that one of the top stories listed on his player page is titled "10 worst reliever seasons ever," and, well, you get the point. Marmol is a fastball/slider pitcher who is basically a flyball producer, and while his fastball still has some life on it (93.7 mph average in Miami), he...
...y'know, I'm not gonna.
The Reds just signed the most Cubby Cub of recent memory. That's been 2014 in a nutshell.
