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Archives for July 2016

Marlins To Sign Cory Luebke

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The Marlins and left-hander Cory Luebke are in agreement on a minor league contract, reports SB Nation’s Chris Cotillo (on Twitter). Luebke, a client of Meister Sports Management, was designated for assignment by the Pirates and subsequently released earlier this year.

There were both positives and negatives to be drawn from Luebke’s stint in Pittsburgh. On the one hand, the 31-year-old was able to return to a big league hill for the first time since 2012 after battling through a host of arm injuries, including a pair of UCL tears. On the other, he wasn’t exactly successful in his reincarnation as a reliever.

Over 8 2/3 frames, Luebke allowed 11 earned runs an coughed up 11 walks to go with his nine strikeouts. That’s obviously not a viable pitching line, but the 2016 results haven’t all been bad. He returned to his usual fastball velocity levels (91.6 mph) at the major league level, and was rather dominant over his time at Triple-A. In 18 1/3 innings there, Luebke pitched to a 2.45 ERA with 14.2 K/9 against just 1.5 BB/9.

Rays Designate Dana Eveland For Assignment, Release Ryan Webb

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The Rays have designated left-hander Dana Eveland for assignment in order to clear a spot on the 40-man and 25-man rosters for right-hander Dylan Floro, per a club announcement (links to Twitter via Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times). Additionally, the team announced that Ryan Webb has cleared waivers and been released following his DFA late last month.

[Related: Updated Rays Depth Chart]

Eveland, 32, has surrendered 19 runs in 20 innings with the Rays this season. He’s punched out 18 hitters in that time, but he’s surrendered a troublesome 27 hits and 15 walks, leading to his bloated earned run average. The Rays will have 10 days to trade, outright or release the left-hander. If outrighted, he’ll have the ability to reject the assignment in favor of free agency, although he’s already been designated for assignment and accepted an outright assignment once this season. Eveland has a 5.42 ERA in parts of 11 seasons at the big league level, though he’s totaled just 443 1/3 innings in that time.

In his place, the Rays will turn to the 25-year-old Floro, who has put up strong numbers in Triple-A this year. While Floro doesn’t come with the gaudy strikeout totals that are often associated with up-and-coming relief prospects, he’s demonstrated stellar control throughout his minor league career since being selected in the 13th round of the 2012 draft. He’s saved seven games for the Rays’ Triple-A affiliate in Durham this season, posting a 2.81 ERA and averaging 7.1 K/9 against 1.5 BB/9 along the way. Floro didn’t rank among the Rays top prospects on the lists put out by Baseball America, MLB.com or Fangraphs this season but has emerged as an intriguing bullpen option for Tampa Bay.

As for Webb, he’ll hit the open market in search of a new opportunity. The 30-year-old signed a one-year, $1MM contract with Tampa Bay this winter but totaled just 17 1/3 innings of 5.19 ERA ball before being designated. Webb’s ground-ball rate dipped to a still-solid 48.4 percent, but he displayed strong control during his time with the Rays (two unintentional walks) and has a track record of limiting walks and racking up ground-balls. Webb doesn’t light up the radar gun, but he’s been a solid middle relief option for a number of years, as he’ll carry a 3.43 career ERA with per-nine-inning averages of 6.2 strikeouts and 2.8 walks to the open market along with his career 56.1 percent ground-ball rate.

Yohan Flande Elects Free Agency

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JULY 6: The Rockies announced last night that Flande has rejected an outright assignment and elected free agency. The 30-year-old Flande will now be free to sign with any club on what would most likely be a minor league contract.

JULY 2: The Rockies have designated left-handed swingman Yohan Flande for assignment, Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post was among those to report (Twitter link). Flande’s departure clears roster space for lefty reliever Jake McGee, who’s returning from a three-week stay on the disabled list because of a sprained knee.

[Related: Updated Rockies Depth Chart]

Flande spent 2008-13 with the Phillies and Braves before cracking the majors in Colorado, where he has been since 2014. In 131 innings and 37 appearances (20 starts) with the Rockies, Flande has racked up a 5.15 ERA, 5.29 K/9 and 3.02 BB/9. The 30-year-old threw 3 2/3 frames for the Rockies this season and allowed five earned on eight hits and three walks before the club designated him. Flande does own an outstanding 58.3 percent ground-ball rate in the big leagues, though a lack of strikeouts and a high home run rate (19.4 percent) have limited his effectiveness.

Cubs Designate Joel Peralta For Assignment

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The Cubs have designated right-hander Joel Peralta for assignment in order to clear a spot on the roster for the return of Adam Warren, per multiple reporters out of Chicago, including the Sun-Times’ Gordon Wittenmyer (Twitter link). The team still needs to make a move for the activation of infielder Tommy La Stella, and Wittenmyer tweets that David Ross is being evaluated for concussion symptoms after taking a foul ball off his mask yesterday.

Peralta, 40, inked a minor league deal with the Cubs after being designated for assignment and released by the Mariners earlier this season. He quickly found himself in Chicago’s big league bullpen, though his stay there proved to be brief. Peralta totaled just four innings with the Cubs, and though he posted a 5-to-1 K/BB ratio, he also served up a pair of homers and yielded a total of four earned runs out of manager Joe Maddon’s bullpen. Homers have been problem for Peralta all season long, and the result has been a 5.93 ERA in 27 1/3 innings between Chicago and Seattle.

Marlins Place Justin Bour On DL, Select Don Kelly, Designate Eric Jokisch

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The Marlins announced this morning that they’ve placed first baseman Justin Bour on the 15-day disabled list, retroactive to July 3, with a sprained right ankle. In a corresponding move, the Fish have selected the contract of veteran utility man Don Kelly from Triple-A New Orleans and designated left-hander Eric Jokisch for assignment.

[Related: Updated Miami Marlins depth chart]

Bour, incredibly, becomes the first Miami position player to land on the disabled list this season, as the Herald’s Clark Spencer points out (Twitter link). His absence from the lineup will assuredly be felt by the Marlins. While not a household name, the 28-year-old Bour has established himself as an excellent platoon weapon at first base and is hitting .268/.347/.526 with 15 homers and 10 doubles on the season. Of his 242 plate appearances this season, 220 have come against right-handed pitching.

Kelly, 36, is in his second season with the Marlins organization but received just one plate appearance in the big leagues last season. He spent most of the year on the disabled list recovering first from a broken finger and then from Tommy John surgery on his throwing elbow. He’ll presumably pair up with Chris Johnson to form a platoon at first base through at least the All-Star break. Kelly, a fixture on the Tigers’ roster from 2009-14, has batted .223/.288/.273 in 48 games at Triple-A this year as he recovers from the aforementioned elbow operation. The versatile veteran has played at least 300 innings at all three outfield positions and each corner infield spot in parts of eight Major League seasons, during which he’s compiled a .232/.296/.335 batting line.

Jokisch, 26, was an April waiver claim by the Marlins and has turned in a 2.64 ERA across 30 2/3 innings at the Triple-A level. However, he’s carrying a lackluster 19-to-14 K/BB ratio in that time, and left-handed opponents are batting .250/.366/.400 against him this season. He’s allowed more than a hit per inning in addition to his problematic control, leading FIP to forecast a more pessimistic 4.36 mark.

Pirates To Promote Tyler Glasnow

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9:25am: Glasnow will actually debut tomorrow against the Cardinals, Olney now tweets. Rob Biertempfel of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review tweets that Glasnow’s promotion was in part driven by uncertainty surrounding Niese’s left knee. Niese’s start has been pushed from Thursday to Sunday, and he’s being examined in Pittsburgh today.

8:39am: The Pirates will promote top prospect Tyler Glasnow to make a start this weekend against the Cubs, reports ESPN’s Buster Olney (via Twitter).

Tyler Glasnow

The 22-year-old Glasnow entered the season rated as a consensus top 15 prospect throughout the game and has worked to a 1.78 ERA through 96 innings at the Triple-A level this season. While he’s averaged 10.6 strikeouts per nine innings pitched in that time, he’s also averaged 4.9 walks per nine, so there are certainly some control issues that need to be further smoothed out. That high walk rate notwithstanding, Glasnow has yielded just 13 hits over his past 40 frames.

Entering the season, Baseball America rated Glasnow as the No. 14 prospect in baseball, writing that he featured a fastball that sits 94-96 mph but tops out at 99 mph and appears even faster than that to hitters due to his 6’8″ frame. Glasnow also offers a curve and a changeup, the former of which BA termed “unhittable when he has command of it.” MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo and Jim Callis rated Glasnow as the No. 10 prospect and praised his clean delivery but noted that he struggles to consistently repeat it due to his size. ESPN’s Keith Law ranked him fourth on his midseason update of the game’s Top 25 prospects, calling him a future ace. Virtually any scouting report one can find on Glasnow agrees that his ceiling is that of a top-of-the-rotation starter, and the Pirates undoubtedly have visions of Glasnow and fellow top prospect Jameson Taillon joining current ace Gerrit Cole atop their rotation for the next several years in their perfect-world scenario.

Pittsburgh currently has Cole, Taillon and Ryan Vogelsong on the Major League disabled list, so the need for some rotation help is understandable. Those injuries, combined with struggles from veterans such as Francisco Liriano and Jon Niese, have led to season-long rotation problems. As such, the Bucs have had to dip into their farm system on multiple occasions to help patch things up; Pittsburgh received four good innings from left-hander Steven Brault in his big league debut yesterday and, and rookie right-hander Chad Kuhl has also made a pair of starts in the past week. The overall results for the starting staff haven’t been pretty, as Pirates starters rank 20th in the Majors with a 4.67 ERA and 21st with 464 innings thrown. Glasnow will become the 11th player to make a start for the team in 2016.

Innings don’t figure to be as significant of an issue with Glasnow as they are with Taillon, who didn’t pitch in 2014-15 due to injuries. However, Glasnow did total a fairly limited 109 1/3 innings last season between Double-A and Triple-A (an ankle injury cost him about a month of the season), and his career-high for innings pitched came back in 2014, when he totaled 143 2/3 frames between Class-A Advanced and the Arizona Fall League. As such, the Bucs will probably keep an eye on his workload moving forward.

Exactly how he factors into the rotation plans moving forward is yet unclear — this could be a spot start, or Glasnow could make regular starts with innings/pitch limits moving forward — but given the team’s injuries and the presence of Brault and Kuhl in the current rotation picture, it certainly seems possible that there’s a permanent spot to be won. If Glasnow is indeed in the Majors to stay, he’d be controllable through the 2022 season and would not be eligible for arbitration until after the 2019 season. He won’t sniff Super Two eligibility as it stands right now, as he’d finish the year with 87 days of Major League service time if he’s promoted on Friday and sticks through season’s end.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

AL Notes: Yankees, Red Sox, Davis, Norris, Avila

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Yankees GM Brian Cashman discussed his team’s oft-debated trade deadline stance in an appearance on the podcast of ESPN.com’s Buster Olney (audio link). He said that the club is “open to everything and anything” over the month to come, noting that he’d raise any interest in the organization’s major league assets with ownership. Cashman made clear that New York isn’t going into a selling stance, but also suggested that such a time may come and has been discussed internally. “The clock is ticking,” he said, “and the more that we stay in this mode that we’re currently in, I think it’s going to force us into some tough decisions that we didn’t want to be in. There’s some time on the clock, but it’s getting late, as people would say.”

Here’s more from the American League:

  • Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski says that trade chatter is picking up around the game, Scott Lauber of ESPN Boston was among those to report (Twitter links). Boston had contact with ten rival organizations just yesterday, he added. Meanwhile, the club announced that director of pitching analysis and development Brian Bannister will don a uniform to aid pitching coach Carl Willis in working with the staff. Bannister will not be in the dugout during games, but will seemingly take more of a hands-on approach in trying to solve the organization’s pitching woes.
  • It’s always concerning when a pitcher hits the DL with forearm issues, as was the case earlier today for Royals closer Wade Davis, but Kansas City doesn’t seem to be ringing any alarm bells. As Rustin Dodd of the Kansas City Star reports (links to Twitter), manager Ned Yost says that Davis’s ligament isn’t implicated. Yost added that Davis pitched through a similar problem last year, and Davis himself notes that he isn’t too concerned at this point.
  • The Tigers have placed lefty Daniel Norris on the DL with an oblique strain. That’s not great news for a team that has had some rotation questions arise, as Norris had showed some interesting results in his four big league appearances this year. He has allowed seven earned runs and 17 hits in 13 innings, but his sparkling 16:3 K/BB ratio is certainly promising.
  • White Sox backstop Alex Avila is headed to the DL after leaving tonight’s game with a hamstring strain, as Dan Hayes of CSN Chicago tweets. It’s too soon to know how long he’ll be out, but hamstring problems can linger. The 29-year-old has compiled a sturdy .231/.361/.347 batting line on the year while serving as part of a platoon with Dioner Navarro behind the dish. Brett Hayes could be an option behind the dish for the Sox, though he’d need to be added to the 40-man roster. The seven-year big league veteran has a .225/.354/.425 batting line through 13 games for Chicago’s Triple-A affiliate since being acquired in a minor trade earlier this summer.

Rangers Acquire International Bonus Slot From Mariners

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The Rangers have acquired an international bonus slot from the Mariners in exchange for outfielder Ryan Strausborger, both clubs have announced. Texas will receive a $210,700 slot in the swap, Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reports on Twitter.

Entering the July 2 signing period, the Rangers had just $2,157,400 available in their overall spending pool allocation. They’ll bump that up to $2,368,100 with today’s move. As Baseball America’s Ben Badler explained in the run-up to this year’s international market, Texas is expected to put together a class headlined by catcher David Garcia — who the team has already locked up.

Seattle obviously felt that it wouldn’t need its entire pool to accommodate its arrangements with this year’s crop of amateur talent. In return for giving up the slot, the Mariners will receive a player who has only scant MLB experience at 28 years of age.

A 16th-round pick in the 2010 draft, Strausborger has played exclusively thus far in the Rangers organization. Over parts of three seasons at the Triple-A level, he has put up a .273/.328/.411 slash in 919 plate appearances. Strausborger has only hit 19 long balls in that span, but does add some value on the bases, having racked up 57 steals in his time at the highest level of the minors.

C.J. Wilson To Undergo Shoulder Surgery

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Angels lefty C.J. Wilson will undergo surgery on his left shoulder, per a club announcement. The procedure will address “fraying” in his labrum and rotator cuff and will keep him out until 2017.

Wilson, 35, has simply not shown progress after dealing with shoulder soreness this spring. He has yet to appear in the majors this season, and also had his 2015 season cut short by arm surgery — that time to remove bone chips from his elbow.

With the news, Wilson will hit the open market without returning to the bump for the Halos. He joined the organization on a five-year, $77.5MM free agent contract before the 2012 season.

That signing may not have paid off quite as much as hoped, but Wilson was useful for Los Angeles over his four years of active duty with the club. All told, Wilson contributed 722 1/3 innings of 3.87 ERA pitching, with 7.7 K/9 against 3.8 BB/9.

Depending upon how his rehab goes, Wilson could feature as an interesting bounceback candidate on the open market. Teams are always in need of sturdy, back-of-the-rotation arms, and we’ve seen fairly significant guarantees handed out to similarly-accomplished pitchers who have recent injury concerns.

Rockies Place Justin Miller On DL, Activate Adam Ottavino

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The Rockies have placed righty Justin Miller on the 15-day DL, MLB.com’s Thomas Harding tweets.* His roster spot will go to fellow right-hander Adam Ottavino, who has been activated from the disabled list.

[Related: Updated Rockies Depth Chart]

Miller, 29, had pitched to a 5.35 ERA over 35 1/3 innings on the year, with 9.4 K/9 against 4.3 BB/9. That represents a somewhat disappointing follow-up on a 2015 campaign in which he allowed just over four earned per nine — no mean feat when pitching at Coors Field — with a 3.45 K/BB ratio, making him quite a productive minor-league signee.

Certainly, a .360 BABIP-against has not helped Miller’s cause, but he’s also been more prone to the long ball — making for a poor combination with an elevated walk rate. Miller is still in the zone just as much as he was last year, but is getting less swings and misses as batters have resisted his off-the-plate offerings.

It’ll certainly be interesting to see how Ottavino returns after missing most of 2015 due to Tommy John surgery. He had claimed Colorado’s closer role after two straight quality campaigns. Ottavino had not allowed an earned run in 10 1/3 innings before he busted his ulnar collateral ligament, with 11.3 K/9 against just 1.7 BB/9.

In the meantime, the Rox have added Jake McGee and more recently elevated Carlos Estevez to 9th-inning duties, so Ottavino probably won’t go right back to closing. But Ottavino signed an offseason extension with the club while rehabbing, so he’s a fixed-cost asset. That increases the appeal of allowing him to rack up the saves rather than the other pitchers, each of whose future earnings would be impacted by counting statistics in the arbitration process.

*An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Miller had been designated for assignment. Harding has since clarified that he was moved to the disabled list.

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