who do you believe deserves #5?

if you’re brad holt, you can survive in the majors with just a nasty fastball (exhibits a & b: maine and big pelf) and build up from there. you won’t always be dominant but you’ll survive and it gives you a good base.

but if you’re jon niese you can’t survive with just a nasty curve. unfortunately for niese it almost always comes back to the fastball at the major league level and his is middling at best. to make up for that you need at least 2 other solid options and at the moment he only has 1.

Is really hard to grade. I mean, he’s basically matched what Holt has done, but its taken him two years longer, and he’s done most of it in short relief. Like what I was saying above with Holt, this is an issue of context, but so much of the context is diluted with Rustich that its hard to draw anything conclusive out of it. I’d have to dig a little deeper to find out what all the specific injuries he’s had are, but Toby Hyde called his issues last year “dead arm” .

The other piece of it with Rustich though is his college track record. He had a finger injury in 2006, and so he was moved to relief full time in 2007. And aside from that, he really never had great numbers, despite overwhelmingly positive reviews from scouts. He had a 5.77 ERA though and 53/32 K/BB in 72.1 IP.

The confusing thing is the Mets decision to spend so much time dangling him between the bullpen at the rotation. It seems like the fact that he’s any success in the bullpen thus far has been a huge win, and they may have hit a nice outcome here and earned themselves the quality relief prospect they missed out on with Kunz. But they’ve spent so much time trying to “ease” him into the rotations every year, last year it caused him some arm problems, this year he’s had blister problems and really hasn’t thrown more than three or four innings in his starts anyway. There are just things you can’t know about Rustich that you can know about Holt. Will he maintain plus velocity deep into games? Will his secondary stuff and command hold up going through lineups more than once? You have some of these answers with Holt, you really don’t have any for Rustich.

Its a good point on Rustich’s platoon splits. They’re much more significant than Holt’s. In Holt’s short career, he walks lefties quite a bit more, but he also strikes them out at a higher clip and gets them to hit more groundballs. His BABIP is also really low against lefties, and that will likely change and yield some sort of platoon split, but if keeps missing as many lefty bats as he does righties, he should be okay.

Rustich falls off quite a bit more against lefties. He doesn’t have Holt’s absurd strikeout rate to begin with, and it does fall off against lefties pretty consistently against lefties through his career, as does his command.