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Mariners Notes: Roster Expansion, Wilhelmsen, Clevenger

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Mariners manager Scott Servais doesn’t mind having extra players on his roster, but the way teams are allowed to use their call-ups following September roster expansion bothers him, Matt Pentz of the Seattle Times writes. With more tactical options available, managers can slow the pace of games by making large numbers of substitutions. “I just think you should determine your 25-man roster before the game starts and play the game,” says Servais. “The game just changes in September, and it shouldn’t change. You play a certain way for five months and the last month, you play differently and it’s just not right.” M’s utilityman Shawn O’Malley disagrees, saying that everyday players can use the extra bit of rest reinforcements can provide. “Maybe it does take a little bit longer, but at the end of the day, what’s 20 minutes?” he says. “Any time you can give guys that are playing 159 games a year a five-inning break, it benefits them.” Here’s more from Seattle.

  • The Mariners have announced that reliever Tom Wilhelmsen has been activated from the 15-day DL. The righty has missed the past two weeks due to low back spasms. For the season, Wilhelmsen has posted a 7.02 ERA, 5.7 K/9 and 3.2 BB/9 over 41 innings, but his performance has been much closer to his career norms since he returned to the Mariners organization in June after struggling in the early going with the Rangers.
  • In other Mariners injury news, catcher Steve Clevenger’s season is over after the organization opted to end his rehab assignment at Double-A Jackson, Ryan Divish of the Times writes. Clevenger has experienced lingering elbow soreness. The Mariners placed him on the DL in late June with a separate injury, a hand fracture for which he had surgery. The 30-year-old Clevenger collected just 76 plate appearances in his first season in Seattle, batting .221/.303/.309 with one home run. That’s a stark contrast from the performance of Orioles slugger Mark Trumbo, for whom Seattle acquired Clevenger in a salary-shedding move. Clevenger will be eligible for arbitration after the season. With Chris Iannetta having a $4.25MM club option, the Mariners will have some decisions as they attempt to determine who, besides the hot-hitting Mike Zunino, will catch for them next season.

Phillies Designate Taylor Featherston For Assignment

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The Phillies have announced that they’ve designated infielder Taylor Featherston for assignment. They also selected the contract of lefty Joely Rodriguez and recalled outfielder Cody Asche and righties Luis Garcia and Phil Klein. The moves come in the wake of the end of Triple-A Lehigh Valley’s season last night.

The Phillies acquired Featherston in a minor trade with the Angels in February, and the 26-year-old played sparingly in the big leagues in 2016, collecting just 28 plate appearances. He spent the bulk of the season at Lehigh Valley, where he hit .254/.311/.428 with 13 homers in 439 plate appearances while playing third base, second base and shortstop. Featherston, who made his Major League debut in 2015 after the Angels selected him from the Rockies organization in the Rule 5 Draft, has a career .156/.207/.233 line in 120 big-league games, many of which he entered as a defensive replacement.

5 Key Stories: 9/3/16 – 9/9/16

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Here’s a look back at five key stories this week at MLBTR this week.

Mets sign Tim Tebow. Scoff if you like — after all, this was a minor league signing of a 29-year-old whose chances of reaching the Majors appear remote, to say the least. But public interest in the former Jets and Broncos quarterback remains intense, and plenty of sports fans will be following Tebow’s career in the minors. Here’s a post in which Mets GM Sandy Alderson explains the signing, and here’s a note from earlier in the week, when it looked like Tebow might head to the Braves organization, not the Mets.

"<strongAlexei Ramirez changes teams. The veteran shortstop was released by the Padres last weekend following an underwhelming .240/.275/.330 performance in San Diego. In the wake of an injury to Matt Duffy, the Rays snapped Ramirez up later in the week, and he’s already played two games for Tampa Bay.

Plenty of injury news. Star-crossed Mets starter Zack Wheeler’s season is over due to a flexor muscle strain, and Yankees starter Chad Green is done as well, thanks to a sprained right UCL and strained flexor tendon. The Angels’ Cam Bedrosian saw his dominant 2016 campaign end, as he had surgery on a blood clot in his right arm, while Athletics reliever Fernando Rodriguez had shoulder surgery. There were also important pitchers who got bad injury news that might not be season-ending — the Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg was diagnosed with a flexor mass strain, while the Astros’ Dallas Keuchel was shut down with shoulder trouble. Meanwhile, a key hitting prospect, Braves shortstop Ozzie Albies, saw his season end due to a fractured elbow.

Not all the injury news was bad, however. The Marlins activated Giancarlo Stanton (groin strain) with the idea that he would pinch-hit, while Clayton Kershaw (herniated disc) returned to the Dodgers.

Brewers acquire Ryan Cordell from Rangers. The Brewers and Rangers completed the Jonathan Lucroy / Jeremy Jeffress trade, with the Rangers sending 3B/OF Cordell to Milwaukee, which already got outfielder Lewis Brinson and righty Luis Ortiz in the deal. Cordell had been rated among the Rangers’ top ten prospects and was hitting .264/.319/.484 for Double-A Frisco.

Twins weigh front office candidates. Current Dodgers exec and former Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos emerged early in the week as a candidate for a top job with the Twins, who are revamping their front office in the wake of the departure of Terry Ryan. But Anthopoulos has told colleagues the time isn’t right for him to leave Los Angeles. The Twins also appear to be considering Cubs execs Jason McLeod and Shiraz Rehman.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

Jeff Luhnow Reflects On Decision To Pass On Kris Bryant

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The Astros have more than their share of highly talented young players, but one player they don’t have in their system is Cubs masher Kris Bryant. Houston had the chance to take Bryant with the first pick in the 2013 draft, but they decided on righty Mark Appel instead, and the Cubs snagged Bryant with the next selection. Appel, now 25, has yet to make his big-league debut, and was traded to the Phillies in the Ken Giles deal last offseason. Bryant, meanwhile, leads the NL in home runs, runs scored and OPS+ while anchoring an intimidating Cubs lineup.

The Cubs and Astros are currently playing a series, so Astros GM Jeff Luhnow fielded questions about the Bryant-Appel decision. Here’s some of what he had to say, courtesy of Gordon Wittenmyer of the Chicago Sun-Times.

“There’s a history lesson to be learned about the risk with pitchers vs. position players,” says Luhnow, referring to the tendency of position players to be better bets in the early stages of the draft. “[T]hat’s a history lesson that’s been laid out over a long period of time. Having said that, if you want an impact pitcher, you have to gamble.”

The Astros have had plenty of experience selecting both position players and pitchers with top picks in recent years. Of their ten first-round picks from 2011 to 2016, six were position players, and three of those (George Springer, Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman) clearly look to be significant parts of their future. Another, outfielder Derek Fisher, was a later selection who doesn’t look like an impact player, but who has consistently hit well in the minors. The others, Kyle Tucker and Daz Cameron, were drafted last year and are still teenagers. Cameron has struggled so far in his pro career, but Tucker’s is off to a fast start, as he’s already advanced all the way to Class A+ Lancaster.

Meanwhile, two of four pitchers the Astros have selected in the first round, Appel and Brady Aiken, have suffered significant speed bumps even though they were both first overall picks, and the Astros famously didn’t even sign Aiken due to a disagreement regarding the Astros’ concerns about his health. One of their other first-round pitching picks was this year’s 17th overall selection, Forrest Whitley, about whom it’s way too early to pass judgment. Even granting the Astros’ success with 2012 supplemental pick Lance McCullers, their experience does seem to bear out the maxim that there are considerable risks to selecting pitchers at the top of the draft.

Nonetheless, Luhnow says the Appel/Bryant decision doesn’t keep him up nights. “We’ve got Carlos Correa. We’ve got Alex Bregman. We’ve got Lance McCullers. Our scouting department has done a nice job with the draft,” he says. “You can always look back and say I should have taken this player instead of that player, but there’s no reason to really dwell on it.”

Alex Anthopoulos Says He’s No Longer A Candidate For Twins Job

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SATURDAY: Anthopoulos has told colleagues that the timing is poor for him to take a top baseball operations job elsewhere, Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press writes. That means he won’t be taking a new job with the Twins. The Dodgers exec recently had his family join him in the Los Angeles area, and his two young children are recently started school.

TUESDAY: Alex Anthopoulos is a “confirmed candidate” to take over the Twins’ soon-to-be-created position of president of baseball operations, Jon Morosi of MLB Network reports on Twitter. He becomes the first potential front office candidate clearly linked to the organization.

Minnesota has reportedly begun a search to add both a PBOp as well as a general manager, adopting some form of the two-tiered front office structure that has become popular around the league. The team has been relying upon Rob Antony as interim GM after parting ways with Terry Ryan earlier this year.

The 39-year-old Anthopoulos is best known for his turn as the GM of the Blue Jays from late 2009 through 2015. After putting together a postseason club last year — the organization’s first berth 1993 — he ended up parting ways with the club in a surprising series of events.

Toronto hired Mark Shapiro as president, reportedly promising him final authority over baseball decisionmaking. While the Jays attempted to retain Anthopoulos, offering him a five-year deal that he could have opted out of after a single season, he declined to continue with the new leadership and somewhat-altered parameters of his role.

Since that time, Anthopoulos has been working for the Dodgers as a Vice President, joining several other prominent former top baseball operations personnel in the Los Angeles front office. At the time of his hiring, Anthopoulos expressed interest in a long-term gig there — while also noting that he’d be intrigued by the idea of running his own shop again.

AL Central Notes: Verlander, Molitor, May, Milone, Salazar, Cain

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In his latest column, Yahoo’s Jeff Passan chronicles Justin Verlander’s return to prominence as one of the game’s most dominant pitchers. Passan spoke to a very candid Verlander, who explained that during the 2014 season — the worst of his career — he felt pain in his shoulder through virtually every pitch he delivered. However, as Passan notes, Verlander was keenly aware of the expectations that came along with signing a $180MM contract and was resolved to pitch so long as he was physically capable. Verlander admitted to Passan that for awhile, baseball was no longer fun for him. The Detroit ace walked Passan through his recovery, beginning with recovery from surgery to repair a torn abdominal muscle (which was, perhaps the root of all of his problems, as his mechanics were drastically altered to compensate). As Passan points out, Verlander’s velocity is sitting around 93 mph, and he’s now throwing his slider harder than in the past as a means of differentiating it from his curve. The result is one of the finest stretches of Verlander’s career: a 2.09 ERA and a 102-to-19 K/BB ratio over his past 90 1/3 innings that has firmly inserted Verlander into the mix for the AL Cy Young Award.

More from the AL Central…

  • Manager Paul Molitor has given the Twins every indication that he intends to return in 2017, tweets Charley Walters of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. While that in and of itself may not be overly newsworthy — owner Jim Pohlad has gone on record as stating that he wants Molitor to remain the team’s skipper even after hiring a new president of baseball ops — Walters does report that Molitor is slated to earn $2.5MM in the final season of the three-year deal he signed with Minnesota prior to the 2015 campaign.
  • Earlier today, the Twins activated righty Trevor May and lefty Tommy Milone from the DL, per a club announcement. The 26-year-old May has had an interesting season, racking up 12.5 K/9 against 3.4 BB/9 but compiling only a 4.89 ERA in his 42 1/3 innings. Milone, meanwhile, seems headed for a non-tender barring a stirring performance over the last several weeks of the year. He has posted a rough 5.68 earned run average in his 65 frames thus far.
  • The Indians pulled Danny Salazar from tonight’s contest due to forearm tightness, MLB.com’s Jordan Bastian was among those to tweet. The club emphasized that it was a precautionary move, but this isn’t the first time this year that forearm/elbow issues have sidelined the prized righty. He declined to speak to reporters after the game, Paul Hoynes of the Plain Dealer tweets, with manager Terry Francona saying that the team hopes to “know more tomorrow when he comes to the park.” Salazar lasted only four frames in his latest outing, and hasn’t reached six innings in a start since mid-July. The 26-year-old did manage to rack up 11 strikeouts in his prior appearance, but it has been quite an uneven second half for a pitcher who could be a key part of the club’s hopeful postseason run. Entering his first year of arbitration eligibility — he’ll qualify as a Super Two — Salazar has thrown 137 1/3 innings of 3.87 ERA ball, with 161 strikeouts but also 63 walks on his ledger.
  • Royals center fielder Lorenzo Cain was back in the lineup this evening after sitting out several contests due to a sprained hand, as Rustin Dodd of the Kansas City Star reports (Twitter links). It “doesn’t feel good” to swing, said Cain, who nevertheless managed to reach three times on a hit and two walks. Per skipper Ned Yost, the club will keep running Cain out so long as he can tolerate playing, with hopes that his glove, legs, and savvy at the plate will make up for any limitations with the bat. Asked by MLB.com’s Jeffrey Flanagan (Twitter link) whether he had caused any further damage by playing with the injury, Cain offered a somewhat resigned response: “It’s already torn. So I don’t know if it made it worse, unless I get another MRI.”

NL Notes: Cashner, Pollock, Casilla, Olivera, Solis

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Facial hair policy may not typically be at the top of the list of considerations for free agents, but Marlins righty Andrew Cashner says it’s a matter of concern to him, as Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald reports. The recently-acquired starter says that he “still hate[s]” Miami’s policy forbidding beards and intends to weigh that when he reaches the open market after the season. “That is a big deal to me in free agency,” he said. The 29-year-old seems unlikely to be more than a rental for the Fish anyway — his 4.78 ERA with the team is a near match for the 4.76 mark he put up before he was dealt — but if he sticks to his guns, it would seem that he also will be unlikely to sign with the beardless Yankees this winter.

Here are some more notes from the National League:

  • Diamondbacks center fielder A.J. Pollock left tonight’s action with what the team announced as a groin strain. The severity of the injury is not known at present, but it represents another turn of bad luck for a player who missed the vast majority of the year with a broken bone in his elbow. The 28-year-old hasn’t quite been himself at the plate since returning, though returning to health is the primary consideration and he has only had a chance to accumulate 45 plate appearances thus far in a star-crossed season.
  • The Giants have elected to remove Santiago Casilla from the closer’s role, skipper Bruce Bochy told reporters including Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco intends to play the matchups for the time being, but Bochy suggested both that Casilla could still see save opportunities and that rookie Derek Law may get some chances once he’s back from the DL. Law, 25, has posted a 1.94 ERA over his first 51 MLB frames, with 8.3 K/9 and 1.6 BB/9, and could set himself up as the team’s closer of the future. As for the 36-year-old Casilla, the move mostly represents an acknowledgment that he’s more a sturdy reliever than a lights-out presence at the back of the pen. He still carries a solid 3.52 ERA with 10.2 K/9 against 3.0 BB/9 in his walk season.
  • By releasing Hector Olivera, the Padres forewent any chance of avoiding salary obligations that his jail time would otherwise have freed them from paying, Dennis Lin of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports (Twitter links). It’s important to note, though, that he is only slated to spend ten days in prison after his domestic violence conviction, and the team would only have been able to recoup salary if the time ended up being served during the season.
  • Nationals lefty Sammy Solis has encountered a “roadblock” in his efforts to work through a shoulder injury, manager Dusty Baker told reporters including Dan Kolko of MASNsports.com (via Twitter). Washington still hopes that the 28-year-old will make it back by the end of the year, which could represent a nice boost as the club enters a highly likely postseason berth. Solis has had quite a nice season when healthy, posting a 2.35 ERA in 38 1/3 frames while compiling 10.3 K/9 and 4.7 BB/9.

Mets Injury Updates: Matz, deGrom, Lagares, Duda

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Though GM Sandy Alderson declined to provide further details on the Mets’ long list of injured players, today was rather a promising day for the club’s general health. New York entered play today in Wild Card position, but still faces a tough fight to reach and advance in the postseason, so every source of help will be most welcome. MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo was among those to report on the progress:

  • Southpaw Steven Matz is prepared for his first throws from a mound since he hit the DL with a shoulder problem. Matz will take the bump tomorrow in an effort to ramp back up, which represents progress since the last time we checked in on him. Already pitching through bone spurs in his elbow, the shoulder troubles seemingly represented a more significant concern, but all indications are that the joint is structurally sound.
  • Righty Jacob deGrom, meanwhile, was able to throw on flat ground today for the first time since he was shut down with forearm soreness. He, too, is said to be battling inflammation but not a more significant underlying injury. It seems deGrom may be a bit behind Matz, but both could conceivably return to the Mets’ rotation within the next several weeks.
  • Outfielder Juan Lagares is ready to swing a bat, which represents forward progress from his thumb surgery recovery. But the team is preparing to “push” Lagares forward before he’s ready to hit at the major league level, per skipper Terry Collins, with a view to utilizing him as a defensive replacement and pinch runner down the stretch.
  • The Mets’ most surprising news, perhaps, is that first bagger Lucas Duda is preparing for a live BP session. He has missed much of the year with a stress fracture in his lower back and has seemed at various times to be unlikely to return in 2016. But that could be the prelude to a late-season return for the slugger, who could provide a big boost to the New York lineup if he’s able to return even for part-time duty. His recovery may also bear upon the team’s decision whether to tender him a contract this fall.

Fernando Rodriguez Undergoes Shoulder Surgery

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Athletics reliever Fernando Rodriguez has undergone surgery on his right shoulder, the club announced (via MLB.com’s Jane Lee, on Twitter). Specifically, the 32-year-old’s latissmus dorsi tendon was repaired and a debridement was performed on his teres major tendon.

This type of procedure generally has a good rate of success, Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle explains (Twitter links). It is the same work that was done previously to pitchers such as Jake Peavy, and doesn’t involve more significant rotator cuff issues.

Rodriguez had provided the A’s with 40 2/3 innings of 4.20 ERA pitching prior to the injury, compiling 8.2 K/9 against 3.8 BB/9. He was somewhat more effective a year ago, but still maintained a strong swinging strike rate of about 13% and ought to be a useful reliever if he can bounce back.

Rodriguez was playing on a $1.05MM salary in his second year of arbitration eligibility. He’ll command at least a modest raise on that amount in his final arb year, with free agency beckoning after 2017, so Oakland will presumably look closely at his recovery before deciding whether to tender him a contract this winter.

Dallas Keuchel Cleared Of Structural Issues In Shoulder, But Timeline Uncertain

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Astros lefty Dallas Keuchel is shut down at the moment with shoulder issues, but he said today that he has been cleared of structural concerns, as Mark Berman of FOX 26 reports (Twitter links). Tests showed inflammation, but he says the club’s training staff is confident that “a little bit of time” is all that’s needed to heal the joint.

If the issued had arisen earlier in the season, the ’Stros would surely have less immediate concern, as Keuchel could take his time getting back to full strength and embark upon a rehab stint. Plus, it would be easier to fill innings with an outside addition.

As it stands, though, there’s less than a month to go in the regular season and Keuchel’s absence will tell for a club that’s fighting to stay in the Wild Card hunt. Whether he can make it back by season’s end, or for a hopeful postseason run, is “hard to say at this point,” GM Jeff Luhnow tells MLB.com’s Alyson Footer (via Twitter). It doesn’t help that the southpaw won’t have an opportunity to pitch in the minor league system on a rehab assignment.

At this stage of the season, the organization is likely limited to the arms it already has on hand (see the Houston depth chart here) to fill the void in the rotation. Youngster David Paulino received his first major league start recently, but lasted only three innings and coughed up four earned runs with two walks, two wild pitches, and no strikeouts. The Astros received somewhat more promising results from just-activated righty Brad Peacock in his outing, as he allowed one earned in 3 2/3 frames, but he did permit five base knocks and managed only a pair of Ks.

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