It's problematic that the only way to rationalize the St. Louis Cardinals' decision to call up Maikel Cleto, the unwanted prize in the Brendan Ryan trade, is to assume the Cardinals have no idea what they're doing with Mitchell Boggs, and I'd probably rather see reclaimed Destroyer Jess Todd in the emergency bullpen fodder role anyway, but one piece of good came out of Cleto's rocky debut: We got to see his PitchF/X numbers. How does an average fastball speed of 97.86 miles per hour sound?
↵Cleto seemed to have no idea where it was going, particularly in the first inning, but in a bullpen filled with explosive fastballs nobody's shown velocity quite as consistent as Cleto did with his four-seamer, which got as high as 99 on an out pitch to Eli Whiteside in his second inning of work. Combined with his solid performance as a Cardinals farmhand, Cleto might be a little more interesting than we gave him credit for in the wake of the trade that removed cult hero Ryan from our adoring gaze.
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