Bullpen stuff and Luke Hochevar

Take your pick among KC's problems that lead the team to fall from contender to wishes they were a pretender. My biggest disappointment is the bullpen, look we knew the offense and defense were gonna be suspect to downright awful and they have been. But the 'pen was supposed to be DM's thing, we were told this when he traded away Ramirez and Nunez last winter. Relievers after all are replaceable, fungible commodities blah blah blah!!! The pens ERA of 4.87 is horrible and if you take away Soria (which Trey seems to try to do) it balloons to 5.27, a truly troubling number.

Here are three pitchers that DM traded for position players that are having fantastic seasons. It's hard to fault Moore for Howell because he is only in the pen because he stunk so bad as a starter. But Moore likes to deal relievers so it's safe to assume that Howell would have been dealt anyway.

Player	Traded for	ERA	WHIP	K/9
Jeremy Affeldt	Ryan Shealy	1.33	1.18	6.9
JP Howell	Joey Gathright	1.81	1.00	10.9
Ramon Ramirez	Coco Crisp	2.34	1.08	6.6

Painful stuff. Not one player acquired on the active roster.
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I wrote about Luke Hochevar for Hardball Cooperative recently, here a few tidbits:

• 6-2 3.86 his last 10 starts
• has stopped team losing streaks of 4, 8, and 10 games
• 22 strikeouts, 0 walks in 13.1 innings his last 2 starts