Today Morrow is still "trying" to become as good a pitcher as Vargas has been for over 2 years. That mental aspect of adapting to "that pitch worked in AAA" is not a minor one, (if you'll pardon the pun). But the only place you can work on that is in the majors.
Wait a minute - you're the same guy whose mantra about minor league promotions is that the yo-yo effect (up-down) for the first couple years is not indicative of failure but is just part of the normal process for the majority of prospects, right?
But now Noesi can't be demoted to the minors because he won't learn anything there?
He has 43.1 IP in AAA in his career, and not even in the same season. Felix had twice that. He appeared in 3 AAA games in 2010, 6 in 2011, and was gone. Noesi doesn't even know what "that pitch that worked in AAA" looks like. AAA was the level of the minors where he started to struggle.
If his full arsenal was functional I wouldn't care - I can wait for him to harness plus pitches (as Felix had). Keep him in the rotation for the year and let him learn. Noesi's not showing that he's there. His curveball and slider are basically useless, his fastball has inconsistent release points and his changeup only works if he can throw his fastball for strikes.
AAA is exactly where you want to work on improving your secondary offerings that you're too scared to throw to ML hitters. It's not his struggles on the scoreboard that I care about, it's him being overmatched. Several balls in his shutout game were hammered. They didn't fall in, but he wasn't quite as good as his line suggested in that game when everything was working.
If he can put more of those outings together he can hang around in the bigs a while longer, but if he gets destroyed again, he's out. You can't have one guy chewing up the pen - he's got to be able to fight through rough spots instead of waving the white flag.
Paxton is not in the bigs right now because he's inconsistent, and can give up 8 walks in a game or none. He's got to work on that. If he comes up and gets bombed 3 or 4 times, I can absolutely see sending him down - but at that point our competitive season may be over anyway. It's not over yet.
Erasmo doesn't have a release point problem or nearly the gross inconsistencies of Noesi. If we want Noesi to only work on his two primary pitches, he can do that from the pen. If we want him to round into a fully-formed starter, then he needs to be somewhere he can do that.
If he can't go 2 innings, then the bigs are not the place for that. His next start needs to be much longer and more successful, and a string of more-successful starts couldn't hurt. Beavan is around because he can go deep into games and even when he screws up it's not an explosive detonation. If he kept getting blown up he'd be out too.
You're right, Vargas had goodwill built - we'd seen him be consistent before he fell off the rails so we had a hunch he could get back to that. Noesi has been utterly unable to contain the damage in 2 of 3 starts and has zero track record as a starter in the bigs to fall back on.
He's not gonna get a lot more chances to stay afloat for the Ms if he doesn't clean it up, and I don't think he should. AAA is a useful place.
~G