Goodbye, Masumi, and other roster moves

I think the Pirates are the only team in baseball that has fans that actively dread roster moves. One would assume that DFAing Masumi Kuwata would have to be a positive move, no matter who we bring up, right? Wrong. Kuwata's out after a month of pitching batting practice to opposing teams, Ryan Doumit is going on the DL with a sprained wrist (and he's lucky that's all he's got, that injury looked ugly the way the wrist bent underneath him), and worthless placeholders Carlos Maldanado and Matt Kata are back up.

There's a lot of noise being made over the Katatafish getting the recall instead of Mike Ryan, but the fact that Mike Ryan is an acceptable option to so many Pirate fans only goes to illustrate the problem with the Pirates' organization further. Charlie puts it the best:

The Pirates' reliance on players like Kata, Maldonado, Don Kelly and John Wasdin is actually one of the more interesting stories of their season. They repeatedly call up terrible players regardless of their performance at Class AAA and despite the fact that absolutely no one wants them. They designate these players for assignment and it doesn't matter because they get through waivers, and then they're mediocre or outright bad at Class AAA and the Pirates recall them anyway. I don't have any data on how often other teams rely on players like this, but my sense is that this is really pretty unusual, and not in a good way. Some of these moves are unnecessary, but some of them are just the result of a sad lack of capable reinforcements.

Yeah, that sounds about right.