This is silly, ignoring, as it does, that Robles did NOT "rake" in the minors. He had a half-season in Hagerstown when he hit .305...in 2016. He had most of a season in Potomac -- 2017 -- where he hit .289 with .872. In 2018 he had his broken season in Syracuse, where he hit .278 with .742 OPS.
Robles, as best I remember, had an OK first half of 2019 and began to slip.
So, how is Robles "extremely talented"? Sure, somebody rated him as a "five tool" player way back, and he was high on prospect lists made up in various years. So what? He is fast, but a negative base runner according to Fangraphs. He covers ground in CF, but so do a lot of fast guys. With experience, his hitting has gotten worse. Why think that he will learn to hit by going against the best pitchers in the world? They have talent and they and MLB catchers are smart. They ties Robles in knots.
Give the kid a break. Let him play at a level where he might be successful, might learn to hit, and then bring him up. Why push him to do things he can't do?
https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=robles002vic
I think what you may be missing is that when he put up those numbers he was very young for those levels. He showed obvious talent at those levels, especially given his age. A .742 OPS in the International League (or its new guise as AAA-E) at age 21 is absolutely promotion-worthy, especially for a guy who can handle CF defensively.
And that's sorta the problem. I can't see why sending a 24 year old with 3 years of MLB experience to AAA (or even AA, which would be more age-normal) would benefit him. Once you've had 1000+ at bats in MLB, the minors won't help you unless you have very specific issues that minor league pitchers are actually good at honing, which is not the case with Robles.
Two of these moves make no sense. Klobosits was fine. Clay is awful.
Sam Clay is the latest in a long line of left-handed pitchers who suck and get repeated chances because they throw left-handed. It makes me want to puke.
