Gerrit Cole, The One Pirates Pitcher Without Question Marks, Sent To Minors

The Pittsburgh Pirates reassigned Gerrit Cole, Brooks Brown, Kris Johnson, Ali Solis and Kyle Waldrop to the minor leagues this morning.  Phil Irwin was sent to Indianapolis.

Cole pitched ten innings with the big club this spring, chalking up two starts and appearing in three games.  The right hander struck out seven, walked two, and allowed eight hits.  Most of the hits came against the Twins in his recent outing when he worked like a beast without some of his better stuff.

But each time out, Cole showed success and didn’t ever appear to be over his head.  Pirates GM Neal Huntington has repeatedly stated that Cole ‘will show us when he is ready.’    Sending Cole to the minors is one of the realities of today’s game, but Cole will definitely benefit from the experience at Triple-A.  Besides, he has some people to pay back for that awful outing last fall.

With a few good starts under his belt against some veteran Triple-A competition, it will only be a matter of time until Cole is making starts out of the Buccos rotation.  Do you really feel that he isn’t the best pitcher on the roster even as we speak?  To us, Cole seems to get better, and shows improvement in specific areas of his game each and every time he toes the rubber.

He works as hard as Kris Letang when he doesn’t have his best stuff, and blows batters away when he does.  The first true Pirates ace is on the verge of arriving, it’s only a matter of hard work (and putting the details of the press release together) determining when the Cole Debut will be made.

The rest will be entirely up to Gerrit Cole to handle.  And we firmly believe Cole is going to take care of business in Triple-A as expected in order to earn his promotion to the bigs.

We must admit, it feels funny writing how confident we are in Cole’s abilities; this is new territory.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to watch Cole pitch live, we highly recommend you find a way to do so this year, wherever he’s playing.

Let #FreeCole begin.