The Brewers announced Friday that they’ve signed right-hander Burch Smith to a minor league contract and invited him to Major League Spring Training.
Smith, 28, was a Rule 5 pick by the Royals in 2017 and spent the entire 2018 campaign on Kansas City’s Major League roster, though he struggled tremendously for much of the season. In 78 innings spread over 32 relief appearances and six starts, Smith limped to a 6.92 ERA with 8.9 K/9, 4.6 BB/9, 1.73 HR/9 and a 40.3 percent ground-ball rate. He’d previously turned in an intriguing showing in the Rays’ system in 2017 — his first action after missing the 2015-16 seasons due to Tommy John surgery.
Smith does have a long history of missing bats and has exhibited better control in the minors than he showed with Kansas City last season. He’s a long shot to crack the Opening Day roster on a contending Brewers club, but he could emerge as bullpen or rotation depth at some point in 2019.
Love the signing solely because his name is Burch
Not bad pick up will start seeing the minor league deals with invite to spring training start coming in regularly now. Wonder who is this years Wade Miley
Stearns has a way of finding the needle in the haystack. If Nelson can get back to anything he was before the injury, that would be huge
So gotta ask you how you feel about the offseason that the Brewers have had?
Not bad so far even if you were not referring to me specifically.
Pretty much any Brewer fan I enjoy talking about our team up and down the system
His parents should be in jail for naming him Burch.
Burch flew through the padres system due to his fb
It was effective for about 3 innings when the padres called him up and then the rest was history
Burch Smith was selected by the Mets in the 2017 Rule 5 draft and immediately traded to the Royals for cash. His Rule 5 eligibility remained but he was not the Royals’ “pick” as this article suggests.
change pick to pickup and all is good.
Always a good decision to have some pitching depth, but if all goes well we won’t ever see this guy in Milwaukee.
If the Brewers get a second baseman I wonder if they could grab Devon Travis for maybe like Bickford or something
With Bickfords off feild troubles I’m not sure his trade value is as high as it could be due to the fear of future suspension.