2019 Texas Rangers farm review: Nashville Sounds pitchers

2019 Texas Rangers minor league review: The Nashville Sounds pitchers.

With the regular season over for the Texas Rangers’ minor league clubs, we are taking a look at the performance of each of the U.S.-based minor league teams. Yesterday, we reviewed the hitters for the AAA Nashville Sounds. Today we look at the four dozen players who pitched for Nashville in 2019.

That is quite a list. And as is usually the case with AAA, the guys who logged lots of innings were generally not the prospects — Tim Dillard, Wes Benjamin and Seth Maness led the team in innings pitched this year, and Phillips Valdez was fourth. No one else had as many as 50 innings pitched for Nashville.

Texas did have some guys of note make brief appearances for the Sounds. Kyle Bird and Wei-Chieh Huang each toiled for much of the season for Nashville, Bird pitching well for the Sounds, Huang less so. Joe Palumbo, Taylor Hearn, Kolby Allard and Brock Burke each briefly donned the Sounds uniform.

And then there are some oh, hey, that guy! moments, seeing the names of Kyle Dowdy and Shane Carle and Austin Bibens-Dirkx pop up.

One thing that jumps out at you is some ugly numbers for a few relievers. C.D. Pelham had an 11.81 ERA for Nashville and ended up getting demoted to Frisco, where he also was bad in what was a lost season for him. Joe Barlow, who dominated in the lower levels, gave up 17 runs in 17.1 IP while struggling with his command. Jacob Lemoine put up a 9.83 ERA in 22 innings. Ian Gibaut, in just a handful of innings, had a 7.94 ERA.

But mostly, Nashville was a way station in 2019, with a bunch of guys passing through the pitching staff on their way up or their way down.