Rob Rasmussen getting fresh chance with Los Angeles Angels

If you hadn’t heard of Rob Rasmussen before the Los Angeles Angels claimed him off waivers in late December, you aren’t alone.

But he could play an instrumental part of the Halos bullpen as one of only two left-handed pitchers projected to start the year as a reliever, joining Jose Alvarez.

Rasmussen only has two seasons of Big League action under his belt, spending the majority of the last six seasons in the Minors, where he went 28-34 with a 3.71 ERA in 518.2 innings pitched.

He has four pitches that he relies on: a good-looking four-seam fastball that averages 94 mph on radar guns; a hard slider (86 mph); a curve with a nice sweeping break (76 mph); and an 83-mile-per-hour changeup that FanGraphs suggests he uses only about four percent of the time he throws the ball.

The result? Potential.

As I mentioned, he only has about two seasons of Big League experience, an exposure to The Show that is equivalent to 26.2 innings on a Major League mound since he was drafted by the Florida Marlins in 2010.

However, he may feel right at home under the sunny Southern California skies — its where he’s from and has spent the majority of his life, after all.

Rasmussen was born and raised in Pasadena, Calif., attending Poly High School before attending UCLA for college ball.

His numbers in Seattle look depressing at first, but require a closer look before making too much judgement.

Buried in the Minors as nothing more than an average player, he didn’t make his Major League debut until 2014 with the Toronto Blue Jays, posting a 3.18 ERA in 10 games, punching out 13, and walking seven in 11.1 innings.

Last year, he spent the first half of the season back in the Minors and ended up only pitching one inning in June with the Blue Jays before being shipped West to the Seattle Mariners, where he spent August and September at the Major League level.

His numbers in Seattle look depressing at first, but require a closer look before making too much judgement.

Rasmussen’s 2015 stat line says he went 2-1 with a 9.98 ERA in 20 games, allowing 18 runs (17 earned) in 15.1 innings pitched while walking eight and striking out 17.

Certainly, no one needs a reliever in their bullpen with an ERA over, say, 4.00, but Rasmussen has the stuff to get that number down to where it needs to be, and a few terrible outings early in his tenure with the Mariners are mostly responsible for that cringe-worthy ERA.

On Aug. 8 against Texas, Rasmussen was responsible for six earned runs in 0.0 innings pitched, facing six batters and throwing 31 pitches without getting a single batter out. He was responsible for the loss and his ERA, which was a moderate 2.45 on Aug. 7, ballooned to 13.50 after the outing.

A week later, he allowed four earned runs and walked two in 0.2 innings against the Red Sox, but he wasn’t the only Mariners reliever to struggle against Boston. The Sox scored 22 runs in that game and 15 the night before, the first time they had put more than 15 men across the plate since 1998. Hey, that rhymed.

Rasmussen settled down for the next few weeks until an Aug. 31 game in which he allowed three earned runs in 2.0 innings pitched against the Astros.

Other than that, and I know those games are hard to overlook, Rasmussen didn’t allow more than one earned run in any of his 17 other appearances last year.

Now with the Los Angeles Angels, Rasmussen has a chance to do something he has never done before — start a season at the Big League level.

If given the opportunity, I think he will shine as a left-handed specialist to come in and face a batter or two in a good lefty-lefty matchup.

He doesn’t seem to be a pitcher with much stamina, pitching more than 1.0 innings only four times last season, but the Halos lack of southpaws in the bullpen will give Rasmussen a chance to show his stuff.

His value will show early in the year, perhaps even as early as Spring Training games this March and for the Los Angeles Angels he is a low-risk, high-reward-type player. He’s in pre-arbitration and his arm is in the prime of its career.

Look for Rasmussen to make a difference in the ‘pen this season as a matchup specialist.