Duncan Down, Mather Up

Per Bernie, who should know, it appears that Chris Duncan is heading down to Memphis and Joe Mather will be replacing him on the Cardinal roster for a time.  (EDIT: It's up on the PD main site as well.)

Mather's had a fairly successful season at Memphis and we all probably remember how well he looked in spring training.  It was definitely time for him to get a shot at the bigs, and it probably would have come sooner if the Cardinal outfield had performed as many thought it would.  With the relative success of most all the outfielders, though, it was going to take some kind of break for him to get up to St. Louis.

It's interesting that there didn't seem to be this drumbeat to send Duncan down until the last couple of days, then all of the sudden it happened.  Maybe it was because I was out of the loop last week.

As Bernie shows in his post, getting Duncan on track could provide huge benefits for the Cardinals.  When we looked at this season, I think most of us expected the production that Ryan Ludwick is having coming from Duncan instead, that he'd be the extra power source behind Pujols and Troy Glaus.  That hasn't happened, for whatever reason.  If it's because he needs reps after the injury last year, then sending him to AAA to get into the lineup basically every day could be of great use.

But what if it's not?  VEB has shown that everyone tends to pitch Duncan inside more this year.  If he can't make that adjustment, the Cardinals may regret not actively trying to move him last offseason.

I expect that the Cards were hoping he'd have a positive game like last night's to ease the sting of being sent down.  So they could legitimately tell him, "Look, we know you can do it.  See what you did against Oswalt?  You just need more playing time, and we don't have that here right now.  Go down, get straightened out, you'll be back up here before you know it."

It's interesting that the first outfielder called up this year is Mather and not Colby Rasmus, but there are obvious reasons for that.  Besides the fact that Rasmus is only hitting .202 (though coming on--reading the daily reports at Future Redbirds made me see that was happening and now I see he's hitting .303 over his last ten games), the idea is that this is a stop-gap, fill-in measure.  The Cards have said they don't want to bring Rasmus up until he can play every day.  Right now, that's not happening.  Mather is going to be more of a bench guy than they want Rasmus to be.

I wonder if Mather will get the start tonight.  Lefty on the mound, a home game, and the fact that LaRussa has thrown the pitchers called up into their first game to get their feet wet makes me think that he might be.  It could be a lineup like:

Barton
Mather
Pujols
Ludwick
Glaus
Molina
Izturis
Wellemeyer
Ryan

I was way off the last time I tried to guess a lineup, so I probably will be again, but that could be an interesting one to throw out there.

It's been fun seeing young players come up to contribute so far this year, hasn't it?  Much better than bringing up retreads or signing DFAs to fill gaps.

Oh, and in case you wanted to know, the CCH Pittsburgh series preview is up.


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