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I think the happy talk was always signaling that the team considered him a valuable asset to have in reserve and his demotion changes nothing about that.
The top four pitchers were always going to be Paxton, Hernandez, Leake, and Gonzalez once Ramirez went down. What Whalen did was move up from "we hope maybe someday he'll be good" to "he's the first guy up if we need more than Gonzalez".