When the Kansas City Royals traded away reliever Walter Pennington in late July, it wasn’t the move that fans were anxiously awaiting for the star minor leaguer. Instead of promoting him from Triple-A Omaha to help stabilize the Royals’ shaky bullpen down the stretch, the team shipped him to the Texas Rangers in exchange for Michael Lorenzen, a big league veteran who’d been pitching quite nicely so far that season.
The trade deadline deal worked out fairly well for both clubs — but who won the deal?
Some will say Kansas City won, arguing that without Lorenzen, the team wouldn’t have qualified for postseason play, and there’s some mathematical merit to that argument. Lorenzen won two games for the Royals, who grabbed a Wild Card berth by finishing a game ahead of the Seattle Mariners, so there’s some logic that Lorenzen’s pair of wins pushed Kansas City over the line.
But because the same could be said of any other Kansas City hurler with at least two victories, such a claim is tenuous at best. That’s not to say Lorenzen didn’t fare well in Kansas City — as his 2-0 record, 1.57 ERA, and 1.081 WHIP in 28.2 innings prove, he did, and he might have been even better had a hamstring injury not forced him to the Injured List for almost a month.
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