Phillies New Guy Report: Pitcher Josh Lindblom

Over the next few days, we're going to take a closer look at the new players acquired in the Phillies' trades of outfielders Shane Victorino and Hunter Pence. We will start with the guy who's likely to slot into a fairly important role right away: relief pitcher Josh Lindblom.

Born: June 15, 1987 (25 years old)

Height: 6'4", Weight: 240 lbs.

Drafted: Los Angeles Dodgers in second round of 2008 amateur draft.

Major League Debut: June 1, 2011

Arbitration Eligible: 2015

Lindblom is your average man-mountain, midwestern right-handed power arm. His career numbers are very good: 2.91 ERA, 71 strikeouts in 77 innings. However, the walk numbers (28) are high, and home runs have been a problem for him in 2012, allowing nine bombs in 47.2 innings. His home run to fly ball ratio of 16.1% is very high, and should drop, even though Citizens Bank Park is more home run friendly than Dodger Stadium. It's also worth noting that three of his nine home runs allowed this season came in Coors Field, and an additional two in offense-friendly Chase Field in Phoenix.

The predictive pitching metrics are all over the place on Lindblom: FIP: 5.06; xFIP 4.33; SIERA 3.66. Much of this can probably be attributed to small sample size, and SIERA and xFIP's recognition of HR/FB luck.

Lindblom was expendable to the Dodgers thanks to a glut of late inning power arms in the organization. Lindblom is redundant to the Dodgers, but will probably immediately slot in as the Phillies' primary right handed set-up guy behind Jonathan Papelbon.

Among the bigger concerns with Lindblom are his raw fly ball totals (even factoring in his extremely poor HR/FB luck, more fly balls still means a ton of homers), as well as a steep platoon split for his career (.275/.392/.453 vs. LHB; .193/.255/.329 vs. RHB). The split is much less severe in 2012, however, and we're still in pretty small sample size territory, so there's nothing definitive yet.

At worst, the Phillies got a good back-end arm with mid-90s heat in Lindblom. He's not Jonathan Papelbon, Jr., but he's pretty solid.