When I think about the minor leagues, I often think about what it must be like to be the sort of player tagged with the dreaded “organizational depth” label. If you aren’t a Jarred Kelenic or even an Eric Filia, you know that the major league team affiliated with your club is happy to keep you on—they’ve even seen some reason to keep you on—but ultimately, they really don’t think you’ll ever be anything, and neither does anyone else in baseball, really.
Joey Curletta was trending that way, two years ago. Traded for a pitcher who—as of this writing—has been exactly useless as a player and only known for being mistakenly tagged as “amphibian” in a headline, he was about as close to the exact line between prospect and non-prospect status as you could get.