Wandy Rodriguez has been a solid, soft-tossing lefty in the bigs for a while now. He pitched in Pittsburgh, with new Rangers manager Jeff Banister as his bench coach, and has seen varying levels of success and big-time struggles, which was probably why he was cut loose from Pittsburgh in the first place.
Of course, the pitching-starved Rangers swooped in and picked up Rodriguez to help fill their injury-ridden and ineffective rotation, and in his debut over the weekend in Anaheim, he made a pretty strong showing for himself.
In that game, Rodriguez allowed five hits in five innings of work, allowing just one run on 89 pitches — a pretty nice number for a guy making his season debut. Now, he'll get a chance to follow that outing with another on Tuesday night against the Seattle Mariners, and he'll be doing it at home in his Rangers home debut.
The 11-year vet is a career-long National League pitcher, so we'll see how he transitions long term to the AL, where pitchers' ERAs generally struggle. But Rodriguez has essentially been a lock for a mid-3.00s ERA over the course of his career.
So even if it goes up a half-run, that'd be a nice number for a guy who is essentially your fourth or fifth starter until reinforcements come in the form of Martin Perez and Derek Holland, and possibly even Matt Harrison.
