Lloyd to the Royals

Near the end of their latest free-spending offseason, the Mets took the change they found in Jeff Wilpon's living room couch to bolster their bullpen by adding Graeme Lloyd for the league minimum. Today they turned that minimal investment into yet another minor league reliever, trading Lloyd to the Royals for Jeremy Hill, who will soon be 26 years old. Hill has pitched one scoreless major league inning this year, giving up a hit. In AAA Omaha, he pitched 40 1/3 innings, posting a 7.81 ERA, giving up 42 hits, 42 walks and 5 home runs while striking out 41. That's right, his K/BB ratio is just under 1 and his WHIP is over 2. He also led the team with 9 wild pitches. Apparently he's thrown hard and had control issues for all of his minor league career, but the enormous number of hits, walks and runs are something new. His career minor league ERA entering this year was 1.91. His strikeout and walk numbers were never fantastic, but in the last two years he managed to have more strikeouts than innings and about a 2.5 K/BB ratio. Maybe there's some hope of him returning from this year's trouble to his previous adequacy, but with what I know now, I don't really know what Jim Duquette's thinking here.  ¶ joe | 8:09 PM |