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Awesome.

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A while back, I looked at Reds shortstop Paul Janish's career on the pitching mound.  Despite awful results, he actually looked pretty good, hitting 90 with his fastball and flashing a solid change.  Given his horrendous performance as a hitter in the majors so far, I asked whether or not he should move full time to the mound.  Well, it appears that someone as taken my advice; although it wasn't the Reds, and it wasn't concerning Paul Janish. 

Instead the Royals, of all teams, are going to give their horrendous hitting shortstop a shot on the mound.  Now when I say horrendous, that is actually a compliment in this case.  Tony Pena Jr. has a career .237 wOBA.  For reference, among pitchers with at least 50 plate appearances last year, he is tied for 11th.  You would have to be Ozzie Smith with the glove to even be replacement level given that offensie performance.  When you combine that with the fact that he pitched pretty well in 1 career inning on the mound, and the fact that the Royals just "acquired" Yuniesky Betancourt, this seems like a pretty obvious move.

So this seemed like a perfectly apt time to continue my profile of position players, specifically middle infielders, who have pitched in the majors.  On with the TPJ awesomeness!!!  First off, let's check out what he threw in his one outing, graphed by verticel vs. horizontal movement:

Some may call me crazy for showing that TPJ threw 4 different pitches in his breif outings in the bigs.  It's more likely that the sliders are just poorly thrown curves, and the 4 Seamers are just slower fastballs with less movement; however, the guy just got replaced by Yuniesky fucking Betancourt... give him a break.

For more intuitive look, here are his flight paths:

Sorry, no pitcure this time... cause you all really care about those.  You can click for a larger image.   

And no, you're not reading this wrong, TPJ's 2 Seamers has more vertical movement than his slider or curve.  That's impressive.  You can also see that his slider has a crapload of horizontal break, and similar break to his "curve" or crappy slider.  I would say he has good stuff. Even with mediocre offspeed pitches, that kind of sink on a relatively fast fastball is hard to find.

Don't take my word for it... check out the MLB.com clip of him pitching.  Jeff told me that his curveball to Pudge was impressive, and you can see that it is, but I think that the sinker he threw to Raburn was better.  Anytime you can get a hitter to hit the ball straight down, you know he can't square you up.

Anyway, let's take a look at his location:

Again, promising stuff.  He hung a curve or two, but most of his pitches were on the black or just off of the plate.  Those 2 Seamers down and in are going to be filthy with the kind of movement he has.  Just ask Ryan Raburn.

In all seriousness, 12 pitches isn't enough to evaluate a pitcher; not even clowse.  However; he has demonstrated enough potentional in those 12 pitches, to make this a defensible move, especially when you consider his hitting.  Kudos to the Royals for making an unorthodox, and possibly benifitial move.