The Dodgers announced they have selected reliever Andrew Vasquez to the big league roster. Ryan Meisinger was optioned to Triple-A Oklahoma City to clear active roster space, while southpaw Scott Alexander has been transferred from the 10-day to the 60-day injured list to open a spot on the 40-man roster.
Los Angeles just acquired Vasquez from the Twins on Tuesday night, sending minor league catcher Stevie Berman back to Minnesota. They’ll immediately bring him up for his first big league action in two years. Vasquez made ten appearances with the Twins from 2018-19, throwing five innings of seven-run ball. The southpaw was passed through outright waivers that season and has spent the past couple years at the highest levels of the Twins’ system.
Vasquez spent this year with Triple-A St. Paul, working 42 1/3 frames across 33 appearances. He posted a 3.61 ERA and struck out a massive 37.4% of batters faced while racking up ground balls on a huge 61.8% of balls in play. He did struggle a bit with walks, but that combination of elite bat-missing ability and grounders against high minors’ hitters sufficiently convinced the L.A. front office to give him another big league look.
Alexander has been on the IL since July 20 with left shoulder inflammation. Today’s IL transfer makes him ineligible to return for at least the next couple weeks. The team hasn’t provided any sort of timetable, but Alexander hasn’t yet begun a minor league rehab assignment.
Twins gonna regret giving him up for nothing. Dodgers will make this guy something. 14k/9
32nd round pick making it to the majors !!! Gotta love that !
love stuff like that.
reminds me, was looking up the 1996 draft the other day, found out was first year rays and dbacks got to pick.
was curious to see the earliest pick from the rays to make it, then scrolled down to see if any late picks did.
turned out, rays took a kid in the 89th round (josh phelps), who actually made it to the majors (parts of 3 seasons, 0.8 WAR, picked up a few wins, 5 saves).
Way back when there were more than sixty rounds of draft picks. Mike Piazza was drafted in the Sixty-Second round. Round 62.
As a favor for Tommy lasordas friend, Piazzas father
I don’t get this at all. The Twins front office is all about sabermetrics and algorithms, and I looked up like 3 or 4 advanced stats on Vasquez and they all look good. I couldn’t find any good algorithms on Berman. Is this guy great on defense, or does Vasquez have character concerns that caused the Twins to ditch him?
Dodgers have catching depth to spare in the minors which seems to be a need for the Twins. It seems to be a need-based trade more than anything.
Bullpen arm with with high k rates but suspect control for a AAAA catcher with good defense but questionable offense.
Thought they were a lock to get Hand, but Mets claimed him first
No doubt they placed a claim imo. Like you said, Mets just had priority
Hand wouldn’t have been able to be added to the playoff roster. He won’t be for the Mets if they make the playoffs.
Yawn
this team likens themselves to being the best team in baseball…
I thought both SF and LAD didn’t do enough for their bullpens at the deadline. Regardless who wins the NL West this will be an issue in the playoffs. Neither Roberts nor Kapler have shown fee/expertise at bullpen management, you could argue its weakness for Roberts. Having arms who haven’t seen the MLB in 2 years come up in Sept is not optimal.
Roberts doesn’t pick the arms, he can only play the ones he was given. As for “bullpen management,” the better part of that comes from the FO too.
You are 100% correct, FO is responsible for roster construction and they have repeatedly not covered for a weakness in THEIR guy. Roberts isn’t a rookie manager anymore and as someone who watched someone skilled in running a pen daily (Bruce Bochy) it’s easy to an say Roberts simply doesn’t have that in his arsenal.
To over come that. LAD have the most talented starting 8 and maybe the best collection of position players in MLB.. So in that context it’s mind boggling a guy like Vasquez who can’t make the Majors in 2021 in MIN when their bullpen was a dumpster fire is playing in Sept baseball with the Dodgers.
You sound like a complete fool. I’m a Padre fan and can tell you LAD bullpen has premier arms, Treinen, Kelly , Jansen that SF can only dream of.
Bochy?
Most overrated Mgr in MLB history. Bochy has an overall career Losing record. Including a Losing record in SF and here with SD
It’s hard to win in rebuilds
We’ll see how long Vasquez lasts. Most of these guys are one and done. Or maybe two and done. Hardly more than that. Not saying I much like it but I do know it.
It’s funny how all this second-guessing of managers goes. I was at last night’s Dodger game and was just as surprised as anyone there when Scherzer was lifted after the 6th. The guy right behind me was ripping on Roberts so much so that I had to turn around and tell him I noticed the bullpen started warming right after the top of inning ended, so probably something was up with Max and we’d find out after the game what it was. We did. Turned out he’d been pitching through a tight hamstring the entire time and after the 6th he let Roberts know he’d run out of gas.
But it’s always the manager’s fault. The one rule of baseball that never changes.
They’re actually tied now.
Man the Dodgers have been using some bum pitchers out of the pen all season. Last few seasons they havent had to, I wonder if the depth is finally in decline and we will start to see them fall off a bit. They have been the class of the nl for 3-5 seasons now
The Dodgers have enough pitchers on the IL to fill out another MLB roster! The approach since the trade deadline has been to put in a DFA claim, add them to the active roster, run them out there for a game or two, send them to OKC or DFA them, and do it all over again. The rookies in the bullpen now have come thru their system for the most part. Difficult to keep up with all the arms they’ve claimed in the last four weeks. A few decent pickups at the deadline may have eliminated the need for the scramble.
They thought it was Andrew Velazquez. I know that’s how I read it for a second.
I’m pretty sure they’re glad it’s not Andrew Velazquez lol