Impatient St. Louis Cardinals fans finally saw touted call-up Trevor Rosenthal on Wednesday, and it went... pretty well. He hit 100 miles per hour on the radar gun, and he did it with movement, on a fastball that ran back into the strike zone for a called third strike on Corey Hart. He showed off the hard, diving curveball that is supposed to distinguish him from fellow hard-thrower Maikel Cleto.
↵Of course, he also nearly lost one of those curveballs in the stands, on Carlos Gomez's 350-foot foul ball, and he walked two batters, albeit less intensely than Cleto tends to walk two batters.
↵The take-away: He won't solve the Cardinals' bullpen problems, but that's okay. It's enough that he doesn't add to them. Rosenthal's fastball is undeniably great, and his breaking ball is good enough to use every so often, and that formula was good enough to make Jason Motte a set-up man well before he gained confidence in whatever it is he throws at 90 miles per. If the Cardinals can sift a few competent set-up men from all the chaff they've thrown at the pen this year, they'll be just fine.
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