A few notes to pass along out of baseball's West divisions …
- Former Giants top prospect Angel Villalona is expected to report to Spring Training after missing the entirety of the past two seasons while dealing with legal issues in his native Dominican Republic, writes Andrew Baggarly of the San Jose Mercury News. Villalona, a first baseman, has been on the Giants' 40-man roster since last fall. He's 21 now, so he's hardly beyond old, but he'll have plenty of catching up to do.
- The Rangers have a plan in place to ease Yu Darvish's transition from NPB to MLB, writes Tom Verducci of SI.com. Essential to their strategy is to ween Darvish off the high-pitch-count outings he frequently posted in Japan in favor of more efficient pitch counts. As well, the Rangers will limit Darvish's exposure to AL West opponents during Spring Training, and they could skip a couple of his starts in the second half.
- Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times has a look at how the Rangers and Angels positioned themselves shrewdly for their recent TV contracts, and cautions that it won't necessarily play out the same way for the Mariners — or other teams, for that matter.
Someone tell Brandon Morrow that high pitch count outings are not efficient. Please.
When will Geoff Baker stop publishing stuff just for the sake of getting reactions? He has zero interest in the Mariners and how well they may potentially do in the future.
Is Darvish their ace?
Great, now they allow murderer in the mlb.
I believe all charges ended up being dropped…
Of course they were dropped, he paid the family for them to drop the charges, but he actually kill the other guy.
Same thing with Burgos, killed a girl that didnt want to be with him, and paid the family to drop the charges
The cases of Burgos and Villalona couldn’t really be more different. Villalona has this single case in his history while Burgos has undeniably killed two people in an automobile accident, was charged with attempting to kill his wife with rat poison(which you mistakenly labeled a murder), and was convicted(and jailed for nine months) for beating his girlfriend in NY.
He paid the victim’s family $140,000 to drop the charges IIRC.
Personally, even if I knew that I was innocent, I don’t know that I’d trust my future in the hands of the legal system in the Dominican Republic either – especially if I have $2M in the bank. Look at the Juan Uribe case in 2006 – two guys get shot and everybody points at him because everyone knows he’s a professional player with several millions in the bank. Again, both could be cases of players behaving badly, but this seems to be a theme in the DR.
Whether he is a murderer or not, we’ll likely never know but as far as the legality of the case is concerned, he’s a free man.
To be accurate, he paid the family to drop the civil case they were taking. Criminal charges were dropped by the police.
Yu cant count his pitches
LOL, Villalona’s “Legal Issues” = Paid money to make murder charge go away. I’m a Giants fan so I would love to give him the benefit of the doubt, but being accused for murder is as heavy as it gets.
they change their pitch counts because their days of rest between starts is changed by coming to the MLB. in japan, they throw once per week. throwing every fifth day is a major, major change
i agree that teams should be cautious about forcing the imports to change their pitching strategy (e.g. work off of your fastball). but the changes they make to their training regimens are generally sensible and necessary consequences of what are major changes to their career. the MLB schedule is much more difficult
It worked for Hiroki Kuroda. When he came to LA, he agreed to do whatever training the pitching staff wanted.
four days*