Rowdy Tellez will be the biggest talking point around the Pittsburgh Pirates until he isn’t.

Meaning, until he isn’t a Pirate anymore.

And while people continue to try and find solutions to the Tellez problem, one of the most common ideas is to designate Tellez for assignment and call up Jake Lamb, who is currently raking it in at Triple-A Indianapolis. On the surface, it’s an easy call to make; replace an underperforming major leaguer with a vastly overperforming minor leaguer.

But the actual implications of a Jake Lamb call up are a little more complicated. For the 33 year old, Lamb is in the midst of a career year, but is major league success still possible for him?

Jake Lamb has been in baseball for a long time. The Seattle native was actually a draft pick by the Pirates back in 2009, who took him in the 38th round when he was still in high school. He never committed to them though, and three years later, while attending the University of Washington, was taken in the 6th round by the Arizona Diamondbacks.

He rose the ranks of the Diamondbacks’ system rather quickly, rocketing from Double-A ball all the way to major league time in 2014 alone.

After some time spent in fall leagues with Arizona affiliations in 2013, Lamb began 2014 in Double-A ball with the Mobile Bay Bears. In 103 games there, he batted .318 with an OPS of .949. He was promoted to Triple-A Reno but only played 5 games there (batting .500) before a trade left an opening on the major league team, and the Diamondbacks selected him.

Down the stretch he played 37 games in Arizona, and he never looked back.

His only time spent in minor leagues after that was usually on conditioning stints, and from 2015 to 2019 the most minor league games he played in a season was 12.