Royals Sign Ivan Castillo To Minor League Deal
The Royals announced yesterday that they’ve signed infielder Iván Castillo to a minor league contract. The 26-year-old had been outrighted off the Padres’ 40-man roster at the end of the season, making him eligible to sign a minors pact during the ongoing transactions freeze.
Castillo made an incredibly brief big league debut in 2021. He appeared in three games with San Diego in May, tallying a single and a walk over four plate appearances. The switch-hitter otherwise spent the entire season with the Friars’ top affiliate in El Paso, posting a .287/.326/.366 line with three home runs across 435 plate appearances in a hitter-friendly environment. While Castillo did well to put the ball in play — his 17.5% strikeout rate was well below the 22.6% MLB average — he didn’t draw many walks or hit for much extra-base impact.
That’s largely in line with Castillo’s overall track record in the minors. Listed at just 5’9″, 179 pounds, he doesn’t bring much raw power to the batter’s box. But he’s a quality contact hitter with ample experience at each of shortstop, second base and third base. Castillo, who has also spent time in the Indians’ and Blue Jays’ farm systems, was ranked by Baseball America as the #28 prospect in the San Diego organization entering 2021. He’ll presumably try to compete for a utility role in Kansas City next spring.
Yankees Re-Sign Rob Brantly To Minor League Deal
The Yankees have re-signed catcher Rob Brantly to a minor league contract, tweets Joel Sherman of the New York Post. Presumably, the Lagardere Sports client will also be in Major League camp when Spring Training commences.
Brantly, 32, spent most of the 2021 season with the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate but did appear in six big league games, during which time he went 3-for-20 with a double and four strikeouts. He tallied 264 plate appearances in Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, batting .289/.379/.456 with nine homers, nine doubles and a triple.
The well-traveled Brantly has spent time with 10 organizations and seen Major League action with five of them: the Marlins, White Sox, Phillies, Giants and Yankees. He’s never topped 243 plate appearances in a Major League season, however, and hasn’t logged more than 36 big league plate appearances since way back in 2013. Overall, Brantly owns a .224/.287/.324 batting line in 453 trips to the plate as a big leaguer.
Brantly has seen far more action and been much productive in Triple-A, where he carries a lifetime .266/.319/.395 in parts of nine seasons (2171 plate appearances). He’s eligible to sign a minor league deal during the lockout by virtue of the fact that he didn’t finish out the 2021 season on a 40-man roster or the Major League injured list.
Though there was a good bit of public debate on among fans and pundits alike, the Yankees opted to tender a contract to Gary Sanchez, positioning him to reprise his role as the primary backstop. Kyle Higashioka is in line to back Sanchez up, but the Yankees don’t have a third catcher on their 40-man roster and thus were in need of some depth.
Brantly could be just one of multiple eventual additions in that regard, but for now he looks like the top alternative if Sanchez or Higashioka goes down with an injury during the 2022 season. Of course, all of that assumes the Yankees opt to stick with the status quo behind the plate rather than further pursue alternate scenarios once the transaction freeze has been lifted.
John Gant To Sign With NPB’s Nippon-Ham Fighters
Right-hander John Gant has signed with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball, as first reported by Daily Sports in Japan. The team has not yet formally announced the agreement, but sources confirmed the deal to MLBTR. It’s a one-year contract.
Gant, 29, elected free agency early in the offseason after the Twins passed him through outright waivers. The longtime Cardinals righty landed in Minnesota (alongside minor league lefty Evan Sisk) via the deadline trade that sent J.A. Happ to St. Louis.
The 2021 campaign was something off a mixed bag for Gant. Although he posted a plenty respectable 4.09 ERA in 110 innings, he also logged the second-lowest strikeout rate (18.7%), the highest walk rate (14.5%) and the lowest average fastball velocity (92.4 mph) of his six-year Major League career. He’d have been arbitration-eligible for the final time this winter had the Twins opted to keep him on the 40-man roster.
While Gant has never been a dominant strikeout arm or a pinpoint command specialist, he still carries a very solid 3.89 ERA through 372 2/3 Major League frames. He was particularly effective out of the St. Louis bullpen from 2019-20, pitching to a combined 3.43 ERA with a near-identical 3.44 FIP through 81 1/3 frames. He fanned 23.6% of his opponents against a 12.4% walk rate during that time, adding a hearty 49% grounder rate as well.
Gant has worked as both a starter and a reliever in his big league career thus far, with a good bit more success in relief than out of the rotation. The Fighters, however, could potentially deploy him in the rotation. Former big leaguers Drew VerHagen and Robbie Erlin both made some starts for the Fighters this past season — the former more effective and more heavily used than the latter — but both became free agents at season’s end. Gant is the second former big leaguer to join the Fighters late this week, as they announced a deal with infielder Arismendy Alcantara earlier today.
MLBTR Chat Transcript
Click here to read a transcript of Friday’s chat with MLBTR’s Steve Adams.
Twins Hire Hank Conger As First Base/Catching Coach
The Twins announced Friday morning that they’ve hired former big league catcher Hank Conger as their new first base coach and catching coach. This will be Conger’s first Major League coaching assignment, but it’s not his first professional coaching job. He’s spent the past two seasons as the catching coach with the Lotte Giants of the Korea Baseball Organization.
Conger, 34 in January, will make for another young addition to an increasingly youthful Twins coaching staff. Rocco Baldelli is entering his fourth season as the team’s skipper despite only turning 40 near the end of the season. The Twins also hired 41-year-old Jayce Tingler, formerly the Padres’ skipper, as their new bench coach this offseason. Newly hired David Popkins, meanwhile, turned 32 last month. He’ll serve as a co-hitting coach alongside Rudy Hernandez, who’s been on the Twins’ staff since 2015.
Conger was the No. 25 overall pick by the Angels in the 2006 draft and ranked as one of the sport’s top catching prospects prior to his MLB debut in 2010. He spent parts of the next seven seasons playing in the Majors with the Halos, Astros and Rays, batting a combined .221/.294/.360 in 1134 plate appearances. Conger graded as one of the top framing catchers in the game during his seven-year run in the Majors and was generally considered a strong receiver.
Former first base coach Tommy Watkins will move across the diamond and serve as the team’s new third base coach following Conger’s hiring, per the team. Former third base coach Tony Diaz, meanwhile, will move to the role of assistant bench coach and infield coach.
The Twins also announced that Double-A pitching coach Luis Ramirez is being promoted to the Major League staff, where he’ll serve as an assistant pitching coach, working alongside pitching coach Wes Johnson and bullpen coach Pete Maki. The 48-year-old Ramirez has been in the Twins organization for 16 seasons, serving as a minor league pitching coach and pitching coordinator.
NPB’s Nippon-Ham Fighters Sign Arismendy Alcantara
Former Cubs, A’s and Reds infielder Arismendy Alcantara has signed with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in Nippon Professional Baseball, per a team announcement (via Yahoo Japan). It’ll be the first stint in Japan for the one-time top prospect.
Heading into the 2014 season, Alcantara ranked among the sport’s top 100 prospects at Baseball America, MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus (among other outlets). At the time, the switch-hitter was fresh off a 15-homer, 31-steal performance in Double-A as a 21-year-old. Alcantara was viewed as a potential long-term option at Wrigley Field, but he’s yet to find much success at the MLB level.
Now 30 years of age, Alcantara has spent parts of four seasons in the Majors — albeit none since his 2017 campaign in Cincinnati. He’s a career .189/.235/.315 hitter in 459 Major League trips to the plate, but Alcantara has a nice Triple-A track record, including a big showing with the Giants’ top affiliate this past season. In 255 plate appearances with Triple-A Sacramento in 2021, he posted a .280/.337/.586 slash with 17 home runs, 10 doubles and five triples.
Alcantara has played all over the diamond as a professional, appearing at every position other than first base and catcher. The vast majority of his work has come up the middle, with 4053 innings at second base, 3311 innings at shortstop and 1207 innings in center field. He’ll give the Fighters some cover at multiple positions, and given that he only recently turned 30, a Major League comeback at some point down the road isn’t out of the question if he takes his game to a new level overseas.
Blue Jays Pursued Corey Seager Prior To His Deal With Rangers
Corey Seager‘s 10-year, $325MM deal with the Rangers prior to the MLB lockout shocked baseball — both because it was the Rangers winning the bidding and because Texas had already signed Marcus Semien for a surprising seven years and $175MM. As one would expect with any bidding war that reaches a decade and more than $300MM, Texas had some competition as they sought to lure Seager to Arlington. However, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reports this morning that a perhaps-unexpected suitor was one of the primary competitors in that Seager market: the Blue Jays.
The Dodgers also had strong interest in re-signing Seager, per Passan, though that much was largely known to this point. Toronto’s involvement in the process, however, is a newer revelation. The Jays were known to be attempting to re-sign Semien, but Seager’s contract was in an entirely different financial stratosphere. Ultimately, Toronto simply wasn’t willing to match Texas’ 10-year, $325MM terms, but Passan suggests that the team was “very much” in on Seager prior to his deal with Texas.
That’s of some anecdotal note and makes for a fine “what-if” moment for Jays fans down the line, but it’s also informative of the team’s current mindset and simultaneously instructive of how the Jays will be able to operate post-transaction freeze. The Blue Jays have just shy of $97MM committed to the septet of George Springer, Kevin Gausman, Hyun Jin Ryu, Jose Berrios, Randal Grichuk, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Yimi Garcia. Add in a steep arbitration class headlined by burgeoning star Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and the Jays have another $31MM or so in projected payroll, according to MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz.
That brings the Jays to nearly $128MM in 2022 projections — plus another nine pre-arbitration salaries (generally in the vicinity of the league minimum). For a team that opened the 2021 season with about $135MM in guaranteed salary and has previously pushed payroll to $163MM, it’s not really a shock to see that there’s more room in the 2022 budget. However, signing Seager would’ve been about far more than 2022 dollars.
For Toronto, signing Seager would’ve meant had four sizable, fully guaranteed contracts on the books as far out into the future as 2026, when Springer, Gausman and Berrios are all still under contract. (Berrios is signed through 2028, though his contract contains an opt-out after that ’26 campaign.) Any Seager signing would’ve figured to include a salary north of $30MM being added onto that 2026 ledger, meaning the Jays were essentially comfortable with the idea of committing $93MM or more to four players in 2026 — about a half-decade in advance.
With Toronto also surely keen on extending both Guerrero and Bo Bichette at some point, any serious level of interest in Seager is all the more notable. The 2026 season is the first would-be free-agent year for both Guerrero and Bichette, so throwing a Seager contract onto the pile indicates a willingness to spend well above nine figures on 2026 payroll if there’s to be any hope of realistically extending either young star.
It’s all an exercise in hindsight, to an extent, as Seager is of course set to spend the next decade as a Ranger. But the Jays’ apparent willingness to jump into the Seager market also provides some useful context when looking at how they’ll operate once transactions resume under a new collective bargaining agreement.
Perhaps Toronto simply viewed Seager as an exception and was comfortable spending that type of money singularly on Seager and Seager alone. However, the market has several high-end free agents who remain unsigned and will be in position to command sizable long-term deals. Carlos Correa could well land a deal in the same range as Seager commanded. Trevor Story figures to be eyeing a nine-figure commitment, perhaps over a shorter term that caps off around that same 2026 point the Jays’ current commitments come to an end. The Jays have already been tied to star NPB outfielder Seiya Suzuki, and the outfield market also includes higher-profile names like Kris Bryant, Nick Castellanos and Kyle Schwarber.
Toronto certainly isn’t under any obligation to tack another nine-figure deal onto the books, but the mere fact that they were a player of any real note in the Seager bidding shows that they can’t be squarely ruled out from doing so. Another major free-agent expenditure would make for enormous major payrolls down the road when Guerrero and Bichette are in their final couple years of arbitration (and/or into the free-agent portions of theoretical extensions), but the Jays are committed to winning right now. Even with three long-term deals on the books and a pair of high-profile young stars they’ll hope to extend, we shouldn’t assume Toronto will shy away from another major long-term deal.
KBO’s LG Twins Sign Adam Plutko
The LG Twins of the Korea Baseball Organization have signed right-handed pitcher Adam Plutko (h/t to Sung Min Kim). Plutko will receive a base salary of $500K, with a further $300K available in incentives.
Plutko was selected by Cleveland in the 11th round of the 2013 draft and quickly became a well-regarded prospect. For four straight years, from 2014 to 2017, he was considered one of the organization’s top 30 prospects by Baseball America, topping out at #14 in 2016. The reports on him as a prospect noted that his lack of elite stuff could be counteracted by his command and intelligent deployment of his arsenal.
Plutko saw sporadic big league action in his first few seasons, oscillating between the majors and minors, as well as bouncing from the rotation to the bullpen. His longest MLB stretch came in 2019, as he threw 109 1/3 innings with an ERA of 4.86 in 21 games, 20 of them starts. From 2016 to 2020, he logged 217 1/3 total innings with an ERA of 5.05. Those early prospect evaluations about his control proved correct, as evidenced by his 6.3% walk rate. However, he only managed a meager strikeout rate of 16.9%.
Prior to the 2021 season, he was acquired by the Orioles for cash considerations. Baltimore largely used him out of the bullpen, as he appeared in 38 games but just one start. He threw 56 1/3 innings, his walk rate jumping up to 10.6% and his ERA ending up at 6.71. He was designated for assignment in mid-August, clearing waivers and accepting an assignment to the minors. He appeared in 10 Triple-A games before electing free agency at the end of the season.
Plutko, 30, likely would have had to settle for a minor league deal if he stayed in North America. By going to Korea instead, he gets some certainty about his job situation for 2022, with the possibility to earn some extra money as well.
KBO’s Hanwha Eagles Sign Mike Tauchman
Outfielder Mike Tauchman has signed with the Hanwha Eagles of the Korea Baseball Organization, reports Jeeho Yoo of Yonhap News. Tauchman will receive a signing bonus of $300K and a salary of $700K for a total guarantee of $1MM. As noted by Yoo, that is the maximum for first-year foreign players.
Tauchman was selected by the Rockies in the 10th round of the 2013 draft. Though he often hit well in the minors, he struggled in his first couple of tastes of MLB action with Colorado. Over 2017 and 2018, Tauchman got 69 plate appearances in 52 games, hitting .153/.265/.203. Prior to the 2019 campaign, the Yankees acquired him in a trade which, one year later, seemed like an absolute heist. Tauchman erupted that year and hit .277/.361/.504, producing a wRC+ of 128 and 2.6 fWAR.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t carry that forward into 2020, as his line dipped to .242/.342/.305 over 43 games in the pandemic-shortened season. Early in 2021, the Yankees sent Tauchman to the Giants, but the change of scenery didn’t help much. In 64 games for San Fran, he hit .178/.286/.283 and was designated for assignment at the end of July.
By agreeing to head overseas, the 31-year-old has avoided the uncertainty of the ongoing lockout while also securing a larger salary than he was likely to receive in North America. If he can get back into a groove and have a season similar to 2019, there’s a possibility of him being offered a contract to return to MLB, following a similar path to players like Eric Thames and Darin Ruf.
Brewers Sign Tyler White, Jon Singleton To Minors Deals
The Brewers announced this morning that they’ve signed first baseman Jon Singleton to a minor league contract. Robert Murray of FanSided, meanwhile, reported (on Twitter) that Milwaukee is also in agreement with first baseman Tyler White. Minor league contracts for players not a 40-man roster at the end of last season are still permissible during the lockout.
White and Singleton are both best-known for their time with the Astros. The former debuted in the majors in 2016, serving as a part-time righty bat to work into the first base/designated hitter mix. After a very strong .276/.354/.533 showing across 237 plate appearances in 2018, White looked on his way to cementing himself as a long-term fixture on the roster. The former 33rd-round pick struggled to a .208/.308/.304 mark in 279 trips to the dish between Houston and the Dodgers the following season, though, and he hasn’t made it back to the big leagues since.
In 2020, White signed on with the SK Wyverns of the Korea Baseball Organization. He only made nine appearances in South Korea, and he returned to the U.S. this past season. White signed a minor league deal with the Blue Jays last winter. Despite a .292/.424/.476 showing with the Jays’ top affiliate in Buffalo, he didn’t get a big league shot with Toronto. White, owner of an impressive .306/.406/.523 line across five seasons at Triple-A, will try to play his way back into the big leagues with the Brew Crew.
Singleton has only appeared in two major league seasons, but he may be the more well-known of the Brewers’ two new first basemen. The left-handed hitter appeared among Baseball America’s top 100 overall prospects every season from 2011-14. In June 2014, Houston signed Singleton to a $10MM contract extension before he made his major league debut, a precursor to similar pacts for players like Scott Kingery, Evan White, Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert.
The Singleton deal didn’t pan out as the Astros had hoped, as he hit just .171/.290/.331 across 420 MLB plate appearances from 2014-15. He spent the next two seasons in the high minors, and Houston released Singleton in May 2018, not long after he was suspended for the third time in his career after testing positive for a drug of abuse. (Singleton had been open in the past about his struggle with marijuana addiction).
Singleton hasn’t played in affiliated ball since his release from the Astros, but he did return to professional baseball this year. Now 30 years old, he suited up with the Diablos Rojos del México, mashing at a .321/.503/.693 clip over 189 plate appearances. That’s a small sample in an incredibly hitter-friendly environment, but it was eye-opening enough to earn him another chance in the affiliated ranks.