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Wilson Ramos Signs With Long Island Ducks

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Veteran catcher Wilson Ramos has signed with the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League, the club announced. He’d briefly appeared in the Mexican League earlier in the year before making the jump to independent ball.

Ramos, a two-time All-Star, is looking to play his way to the majors for a 13th season. The Venezuela native didn’t make it there last year, as his only affiliated experience was a three-game stint with the Rangers’ Triple-A team. He appeared in 44 games between the Tigers and Indians two seasons back but had his year cut short when he suffered a season-ending ACL tear in August.

Now 35, Ramos is unlikely to recapture his 2016-18 peak form. The bat-first backstop claimed a Silver Slugger award and some down-ballot MVP support in the first of those seasons and combined to hit .298/.343/.483 over that stretch.

He was still a productive hitter thereafter, posting a .262/.321/.407 line over three clubs between 2019-21. That wasn’t quite enough to compensate for Ramos’ shortcomings as a defender, though, and the knee injury dealt a major hit to his efforts to find his way back to the big leagues last season.

Steven Brault Moving To Outfield With Atlantic League Club

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Former Pirates and Cubs left-hander Steven Brault signed with the Atlantic League’s new Frederick club last week, and it seems he’ll do so as the hopeful first step down a new career path. Brault has already played left field for his new club, and MLBTR has learned that the 31-year-old plans to become a position player on a full-time basis. He’ll hope to use this opportunity in the Atlantic League to land a minor league deal with an affiliated club and eventually return to the Majors as an outfielder.

Brault may never have garnered as much attention as some of the other best-hitting pitchers in the National League, but he certainly qualifies among them. Back in college, Brault was a .397/.416/.554 hitter in 199 plate appearances. He batted .419/.419/.484 in 36 minor league plate appearances and is a career .258/.275/.337 hitter with a homer — a second-deck, 441-foot bomb — four doubles and just a 14.9% strikeout rate in 101 big league trips to the plate. He’s gone 1-for-8 to begin his season with Frederick. Baseball America’s scouting reports on Brault from his early days in the Orioles system note that he was a plus athlete and the first player in Rocky Mountain Conference history to earn all-conference first team honors as both a position player and a pitcher.

Brault’s move away from the mound comes on the heels of several injury-plagued seasons. Shoulder and lat strains regularly hampered Brault from 2019-22, limiting him to a combined 192 2/3 frames in the Majors over that four-year period. Most of those innings came in 2019, when he tossed a career-high 113 2/3 frames but also missed more than a month with a shoulder strain.

In his career on the mound, Brault at times looked like a viable starter and multi-inning reliever, but injuries derailed some otherwise promising stretches on more than one occasion. In all, he’s tallied 352 1/3 innings at the big league level with a 4.73 ERA, 18.8% strikeout rate, 11.3% walk rate, 0.97 HR/9 and 45.5% ground-ball rate.

Only time will tell whether Brault can successfully make the move to the other side of the ball at age 31, but it makes for an interesting subplot to keep an eye on throughout the season. His raw batting numbers in the Majors certainly don’t leap out relative to other full-time hitters, but it’s clear that Brault has more of a knack for handling the bat than the majority of now-former mound counterparts.

Steven Brault, Starlin Castro Sign With Atlantic League Team

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Left-hander Steven Brault, right-hander Brett de Geus and infielder Starlin Castro have signed with the new and yet to-be-named Atlantic League team based in Frederick, Md., the team announced this week (Twitter links).

Brault, 30, spent the 2022 season in the Cubs organization but was on the injured list for the majority of the season. The former Pirates hurler originally inked a one-year, Major League deal with the Cubs in the offseason, but that was reworked as a minor league pact following some injury concerns. Those proved to have merit, as Brault pitched in just 16 innings between the minors and the big leagues, due in large part to a shoulder strain.

The few innings Brault managed to pitch with the Cubs were solid. He tossed nine frames and allowed three runs on eight hits with an 8-to-5 K/BB ratio. Brault is best known for his six-year run with Pittsburgh, where he frequently bounced between the Pirates’ rotation and bullpen, ultimately tossing 343 1/3 innings of 4.77 ERA ball in 107 appearances (52 starts, 55 in relief).

Castro, 33, hasn’t appeared in the Majors since the Nationals released him in the summer of 2021 on the heels of a 30-game suspension under Major League Baseball’s joint domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse policy. He had a brief 28-game stint in the Mexican League last year, where he batted .240/.312/.323 in 109 plate appearances for los Leones de Yucatan. A stint in the the Dominican Winter League didn’t go any better this past offseason; Castro managed only a .219/.250/.250 output in 168 plate appearances.

From 2010-21, Castro played in 1573 Major League games and logged nearly 6600 plate appearances with the Cubs, Yankees, Marlins and Nationals. He holds a career .280/.319/.412 batting line.

The 25-year-old de Geus was one of the top picks in the 2020 Rule 5 Draft but struggled to a 7.56 ERA in 50 innings between the Rangers and Diamondbacks that season. The former Dodgers farmhand spent the 2022 season in the D-backs organization, tossing 22 2/3 of 5.96 ERA ball with their Double-A affiliate.

Khris Davis Signs With Atlantic League’s Kentucky Wild Health Genomes

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A former MLB home run champ is headed to independent ball. Designated hitter/left fielder Khris Davis has signed with the Kentucky Wild Health Genomes of the Atlantic League, according to a team announcement.

Davis will use the independent ball opportunity as a hopeful springboard back to the affiliated ranks. The 34-year-old spent a bit of time in the Mexican League earlier in the year but struggled over 12 games with the Diablos Rojos. After a couple months away, Davis has an opportunity to rebuild his stock in the Atlantic League.

Over a nine-year MLB career, Davis has hit 221 home runs and carries a .242/.314/.491 slash line. He topped 40 home runs each season from 2016-18, including a league-best 48 longballs with the A’s in 2018. Davis was one of the game’s middle-of-the-order sluggers through that year, but he owns a .216/.291/.376 slash going back to the start of the 2019 campaign.

That includes a .206/.272/.363 mark through 114 plate appearances last season. Davis opened the year with the Rangers but was released in June. Two months later, he signed a minor league deal with the A’s and returned to Oakland as a September call-up. He hit free agency at the end of the year after appearing in 20 games in green and gold.

Zack Godley, Jairo Diaz, Nick Goody Sign With Atlantic League Teams

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Right-handers Zack Godley and Jairo Diaz have signed with the Gastonia Honey Hunters of the Atlantic League, per the league’s transactions log. That log also indicates that right-hander Nick Goody latched on with the Long Island Ducks yesterday. All three veteran righties have extensive Major League experience.

Godley, 32, has logged big league time in each of the past seven seasons — albeit just 3 1/3 frames with Milwaukee this past season. A solid mid-rotation arm for the D-backs in 2017-18 (4.10 ERA in 333 1/3 innings), Godley has struggled and dealt with injuries in recent years, most notably a flexor strain that ruined his 2020 season.

Since losing his grip on a rotation spot in Arizona, he’s pitched to a 6.75 ERA in 124 big league innings (2019-21). He posted solid minor league numbers with the Brewers’ top affiliate last year but was rocked for 20 earned runs with a 29-to-19 K/BB ratio in 22 1/3 innings with the Reds’ Triple-A club to begin the current season.

Diaz, 31, has three-plus years of big league service and 107 1/3 frames at the MLB level. He worked in some high-leverage roles as recently as 2019 with the Rockies, but Diaz had a notable velocity drop (97.2 mph to 95.3 mph) in 2020 and limped to a 7.65 ERA in 20 frames with Colorado. He remained with the club in 2021 but pitched only 9 1/3 minor league innings due to injury. Diaz briefly inked a minor league deal with the Mariners earlier this year, as reported by  the New York Post’s Jon Heyman at the time, but he didn’t end up throwing a pitch with a Mariners affiliate.

The 30-year-old Goody totaled 152 2/3 innings of work from 2015-20, enjoying his best years in Cleveland (2017, 2019). At his best, Goody was punching out about 30% of his opponents with a walk rate that was only slightly higher than the league average, but an elbow strain and a back injury slowed him in 2018-19. Goody was claimed off waivers by the 2020 Rangers but served up 11 runs in 11 innings with Texas that summer before being cut loose.

Goody split the 2021 season between the Triple-A affiliates for the Yankees — the organization that originally drafted him — and Nationals. He missed plenty of bats (29.6% strikeout rate) and posted a decent 9.0% walk rate, but Goody surrendered too many home runs (1.5 HR/9) and posted a pedestrian 4.53 ERA between those two stops. He’s spent the early postion of the 2022 season with los Acereros de Monclava of the Mexican League.

All three of Godley, Goody and Diaz have enough recent MLB experience that with some success on the indie circuit, they could jump back into affiliated ball as depth options in the season’s second half.

Edubray Ramos Signs With Atlantic League’s Kentucky Wild Health Genomes

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The Kentucky Wild Health Genomes of the independent Atlantic League have signed reliever Edubray Ramos, according to the league’s transactions log. It’ll be the first stint in indie ball for the 29-year-old, who has spent the past decade-plus in the affiliated ranks.

Ramos is best known for his four-year run with the Phillies from 2016-19. The righty was a capable middle innings option for a good chunk of that time. He debuted with 40 innings of 3.83 ERA ball as a rookie, then combined for a 3.41 mark across 100 1/3 frames the following two seasons. Ramos posted decent strikeout, walk and swinging strike numbers during that time, and he showed a knack for avoiding barrels and keeping the ball in the yard despite being a fly-ball pitcher.

While Ramos appeared to have cemented himself as a reliable member of the Philadelphia relief corps, his career was thrown off track by an injury-plagued 2019. He missed the bulk of that season with shoulder troubles and struggled mightily over his 20 appearances. The Phils outrighted him off their roster at the end of the year, and the Venezuela native hasn’t returned to the majors since.

Ramos signed a minor league deal with the Dodgers over the 2019-20 offseason. He spent the shortened campaign at their alternate training site but didn’t get a big league call. Last winter, he inked a minors pact with the Rangers. He never appeared in a game with one of Texas’ affiliates, though. He’ll try to work his way back into the affiliated ranks with a strong showing for the Lexington-based Atlantic League club.

Quick Hits: Alfonzo, Correa, Clark

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Longtime Queens fan-favorite Edgardo Alfonzo has been hired to manage the Staten Island Ferry Hawks of the independent Atlantic League, reports Jon Heyman of MLB Network. The move to Staten Island actually checks a third of New York City’s five boroughs off of Alfonzo’s professional checklist; in addition to his eight seasons playing for the Mets, Alfonso joined the High-A Brooklyn Cyclones in 2014 as Tom Gamboa’s bench coach, eventually managing the Mets affiliate for three seasons following Gamboa’s retirement. He also played briefly for three other New York-area teams: the Long Island Ducks, the Bridgeport Bluefish, the Newark Bears, all also of the Atlantic League.

After eight productive seasons in Queens shuffling between second and third base (and occasionally shortstop), Alfonzo signed a three-year, $18MM deal with the Giants ahead of the 2003 season. He split 2006, his final big-league season, between the Angels and the Blue Jays, logging only 95 plate appearances between the two. For his career, the infielder posted a .283/.357/.425 batting line across twelve major league seasons.

Other news from around the game:

  • Slugging shortstop Carlos Correa, MLBTR’s number one free agent, recently hired Scott Boras to represent him as he looks to secure a $300MM+ payday after a new CBA is reached, and Boras doesn’t seem to have ruled out the Astros as the team that could pony up. Though reports are that the Astros’ best offer came in at five years and $160MM and that owner Jim Crane has insisted he won’t go beyond six years with the star free agent, Boras tossed out a few comments clearly pointed at the Houston brass, telling reporters that the Astros have “been at the championship level for three or four years and…can continue for six or seven if they are able to retain those true core pieces of All-Star level talent” (quotes from Mark Berman of Houston’s Fox 26). Correa is reported to have turned down a ten-year, $275MM offer from the Tigers before the lockout. Should Correa be forced to settle for a shorter-term deal, it’s likely he’ll insist on an opt-out clause that would allow him to return to the market as soon as next offseason.
  • The Royals have hired former Braves chief of scouting Roy Clark as a senior advisor for baseball operations, the club announced Wednesday. Clark had already been scouting for the Royals in an informal, part-time capacity, but the new role puts him back into the office with Royals president of baseball operations and longtime friend Dayton Moore. Moore actually owes his career in professional baseball to Clark, who recommended him for a scouting job in John Schuerholz’s front office in 1994, when Moore was a coach at George Mason University. Moore was hired as the Royals’ GM in 2006, and Clark left the Braves to join the Nationals in 2009. While with the Braves, Clark had a hand in scouting and signing an impressive roster of future big-leaguers, including Adam Wainwright, Jason Marquis, Brian McCann, Charlie Morton, Craig Kimbrel, Jason Heyward, and Freddie Freeman.

Atlantic League To Shelve Robot Umpires, Return Mound To Standard Distance

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The independent Atlantic League, one of four independent leagues designated as official MLB Partner Leagues following the 2020 reorganization of MiLB, will return to the traditional method of calling balls and strikes in 2022, reports J.J. Cooper of Baseball America. The league had adopted the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system — known colloquially as the ’robo-ump’ — ahead of the 2019 season, when it reached an agreement with Major League Baseball to test equipment and rules changes under consideration for use in affiliated ball. The league will also return the distance between the pitching rubber and home plate to the conventional 60 feet, 6 inches after a late-season trial of an extra foot was met with disfavor by players and coaches.

As Cooper points out, the strike-zone change is likely driven by the expectation of a more widespread implementation of ABS in the minors; there’s been no official announcement, but MLB posted job listings for an ABS tech to work with each team in Triple-A West (the successor to the Pacific Coast League) earlier in the offseason. The technology was also deployed in Low-A Southeast (the revamped Florida State League) in 2021 and in the 2019 Arizona Fall League.

Though just one of a number of rules changes mooted by the commissioner’s office during Rob Manfred’s tenure, the proposed automation (and thereby standardization) of the strike zone has proven to be among the most polarizing. Beyond more longstanding intra-fan disputes regarding the relative values of innovation and tradition, proponents of the idea have suggested that a strike zone standardized by precise technological measurement would substantially reduce the element of human error in umpiring decisions (and, perhaps, reverse the trend of declining contact rates), while those opposed argue that imprecision, ambiguity, and the idiosyncrasies of individual umpires — as well as the arguments that often ensue as a result of these — add intrigue and drama to the game.

Regardless of one’s opinion of the potential implementation of ABS at the big-league level, any longtime fan of the game will recognize a progressive change in the strike zone since the advent of pitch-tracking technology in the early 2000s, when MLB introduced QuesTec’s Umpire Information System in big-league ballparks to track umpire performance. This much less invasive system drew its fair share of criticism (Curt Schilling infamously took a bat to a QuesTec camera after a poor start in May 2002, and the umpires union filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board over its use before securing its removal in 2005 contract negotiations). Still, it’s long-term effects (as compiled in 2017 by Joe Lemire of Sports Business Journal) have rendered the effective strike zone closer to its rule-book definition, decreasing its width while increasing its height.

Despite scrapping the ABS, the Atlantic League will continue to test a number of potential tweaks to the game, including the use of 17-inch bases (2 inches larger than standard), anti-shifting rules (which require the four infielders to have two feet in the infield dirt before every pitch), and enhanced extra-inning ’zombie runner’ rules (which would place runners at first and second to start the 10th inning and load the bases in any innings thereafter). Further changes to Atlantic League play are expected to be announced later in the spring.

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