Another day, another pitcher that the Bisons have relied on heavily vanishes from the roster.
On Wednesday the Mets announced that they have purchased the contract of reliever Mike O'Connor from the Bisons.
O'Connor will take the roster spot of Mets' reliever Pedro Beato, who the club place on the 15-day DL with tendinitis in his pitching elbow.
As I wrote earlier in the year, the Mets, and all big league clubs for that matter, tend to play games like this with their Rule 5 picks, and that seems to be the deal with Beato.
A Rule 5 player is a player who was not on a 40-man roster with whichever club owned his rights. In this case, Beato was in the Baltimore organization. The Mets were able to select Beato from the Orioles, with the caveat that he has to stay on the 25-man Major League roster all season long or the Mets would return him to Baltimore.
A lot of times Rule 5 players will be relievers. And a lot of times those players will go onto the disabled list with a relatively vague injury like tendinitis in his throwing arm (what guy that throws a baseball 90-95 MPH doesn't have a little inflamation in their elbow?).
That player (Beato in this case) will probably have an extended rehab stint after his DL time is over, then he will get reactivated by the Mets, maybe head to the DL again later in the summer with "arm fatigue" or something, and by the time September rolls around, when rosters expand, it's not a problem any more, and the Mets essentially will have picked up Beato for nothing.
It's a creative, if not cheap way to skirt the rule that a Rule 5er has to stay on a Major League roster all season.
It comes at a pretty steep cost to the Bisons however. O'Connor spent the entire 2010 season with the Herd, and was great out of the bullpen, eating up 70.2 innings with 70 strikeouts and posting 2.62 ERA. The lefty had already logged 16 solid innings this season for Buffalo.
No immediate move to replace O'Connor's spot on the Bison roster was announced.
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