Kansas City Royals player breakdown: pitchers (part VII)

The Kansas City Royals start Spring Training next week and have their roster pretty well set. The non-roster invitees have been announced and there seems little chance of another free agent signing. This makes it a good time to look at the players who will be preparing for the season and where each of them will probably be on 1 April.

The obvious place to start is with the pitchers an the Royals do have a lot of them in camp this year. There are 25 on the 40-man roster (including two who are still recovering from injury) and another nine non-roster invitees. The analysis for them has thus been broken up into several parts, of which this is the seventh. I look at how the player has done, their role in the club and in some cases what they have to do in Spring Training before predicting where they will be on Opening Day

Sugar Ray Marimon is a right-handed starting pitcher and a non-roster invitee who is getting a chance to push for a roster spot on the back of a decent showing at double-A in the second half of last season. He’s very much one of the also-rans in camp.

Prediction: Not a whelk’s chance in a supernova of making the big-league club and very unlikely to get on the 40-man roster either. Look for him back at double-A.

Michael Mariot is another right-handed non-roster invitee. He had a good 2012 splitting time between the starting rotation and the bullpen in double and triple-A ball, but looks very unlikely to do much in the big league camp.

Prediction: No spot on the roster for Mariot, but probably a job at triple-A if he looks solid.