Daniel Cabrera Signs With Pirates

The Pirates have signed former Orioles pitcher Daniel Cabrera. I wrote a few hours ago about how the Pirates have been very quiet in the past few weeks, but this isn't exactly the sort of signing I was hoping to see. Cabrera came up as an Oriole as a flamethrowing starter with control problems, but as his career progressed, the control problems remained, and the flamethrowing part, well, didn't. Cabrera's average fastball velocity dropped from a ridiculous 96.2 MPH in 2005 to a pedestrian 90.9 MPH in 2009. That led to many fewer strikeouts, which made him just about unusable, even at the Class AAA level.

If he's got some of that old mojo back, he'll probably still have the control problems, but maybe there's some fragment of a chance he could be a reliever. It's far more likely, though, that he'll go to Class AAA Indianapolis and pitch badly, or that he won't make it out of minor-league spring training to begin with.

For more on the Pirates, check out Bucs Dugout.