The Pirates reassigned Andrew Lambo, Jared Hughes, Jaff Decker, and a eight other players were all sent to Triple-A or other minor league camps this morning. There isn't really much news beyond Lambo's reassignment, which has only really seemed like a possibility in the last week or so.
I wrote quite a bit about this and why I think time spent on Ishikawa is just wasted time last night, but I think that going with Ishikawa over Lambo creates one other problem that I didn't talk much about. The reality is that Garrett Jones was pretty terrible last year and that even though Ishikawa's track record is really spotty, it's possible that he could match Jones's production at first. The problem is that Jones's production at first base last year really wasn't acceptable at all and that if Ishikawa matches his .730 OPS against righties, he'll do it with considerably less power. What scares me is that the end result of this decision is that we get a big chunk of the year in which Gaby Sanchez is just the every day first baseman. That's not a helpful conclusion either.
That's really my biggest problem with this decision; in a vacuum it might seem more or less harmless, but it seems to me like it only leads to more bad decisions. It delays a real verdict on Lambo (unless you want to read this as the real verdict on Lambo, which I suppose you certainly could), it pushes us closer to Gaby Sanchez being an every day first baseman and not a platoon first baseman, and it gives Travis Ishikawa a substantial number of early-season at-bats.
I suppose the lesson here is that if you go into camp with an unproven fringe prospect as your starting first baseman, you might break camp with Travis Ishikawa instead. That probably shouldn't come as so much of a surprise.
