I know people don't want to hear this so I'll back you up with some examples from this season. I think DJ43 was hoping to avoid this sort of discussion -- I guess he was silly for thinking that. All of these guys are young pitchers who have had a good ERA for a full season at some point in their career and are sitting over 5.50 on the season. None of these guys are Manny Parra, and of course we could show all sorts of examples of pitchers that are 26 years old and doing well. I don't mind if they send Parra down to work on things but this isn't some huge abnormal thing to have a young pitcher go through a rough stretch Who said it was abnormal? Happens to multiple guys every season. Obviously. Young players struggle and then teams take some course of action, perhaps they send the player to the minors, perhaps they put the the starter in the BP, they may make a trade, they may keep the player in the rotation, etc., -- meanwhile the fans of said team discuss all of the various options that the team may entertain on message boards much like this. a lot of people gave those after Suppan's bad start and look foolish now. Specifically, who looks foolish regarding Suppan? Until you start showing some numbers of how many people look foolish, I am going to assume that this statement is just hot air. Takes a lot bigger sample than this to judge a player. False. It took 1.2 innings for the world to find out Chris Mabeus sucks. Realistically, teams are not afforded large sample sizes to judge all of their players. The pragmatic fact is that players are going to continue to get playing time based on their results -- some players are going only get 20 ABs, it sucks but teams can also err by giving players more opportunities just to get a larger sample to judge them -- increasing the sample size comes at a risk. I think we all agree Parra is struggling -- no one yet has said "DFA" or "bag of balls", so I think we can discuss what the Brewers should do (doing nothing being one entirely reasonable option) w/o getting into general non-constructive arguments about a perceived panic that does not exist.