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Adrian Morejon

Padres To Promote Adrian Morejon

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The Padres will promote Double-A left-hander Adrian Morejon to the majors Saturday, Dennis Lin of The Athletic reports. The club’s 40-man roster is full, so it will need to make a corresponding move to clear a spot for Morejon.

Now 20, Morejon is three years removed from joining the Padres for a whopping $11MM bonus as an international free agent out of Cuba. Morejon has been somewhat injury plagued since signing that deal, ESPN’s Keith Law recently noted (subscription required), yet he’s still considered one of the game’s most exciting farmhands. Both Baseball America (No. 46) and MLB.com (No. 49) rank Morejon among the majors’ 50 best prospects. In their free scouting report, Jim Callis and Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com laud Morejon’s arsenal – which includes a mid- to high-90s fastball, two above-average kinds of changeups and a curveball – and add he could become a mid-rotation starter or better in the majors.

Morejon will work out of the bullpen in his first major league action, according to Lin, as he’s not stretched out to start in the bigs at this juncture. He has combined for just 36 innings in 16 appearances this year at the Double-A level, where he has posted a 4.25 ERA/3.69 FIP with 11.0 K/9, 3.75 BB/9 and a 50.6 percent groundball rate.

Morejon’s presence will give the slumping Padres a second lefty reliever to join Matt Strahm in a righty-heavy relief setup. In the event he stays up through the season, Morejon will accrue 71 days of service time.

NL West Notes: Thole, Giants Outfield, Padres, Dodgers

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News and rumblings from around the NL West…

  • Josh Thole suffered a “significant” hamstring tear that Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo expects will sideline the catcher for the season, Lovullo told reporters (including Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic).  Thole is getting a second opinion on the injury and surgery is a possibility.  The veteran catcher was in Arizona’s camp on a minor league deal battling for the backup role, though signs pointed to Thole starting the year at Triple-A.
  • While the Giants have many homegrown stars on their roster, the team has been strangely unsuccessful in their attempts to draft and develop everyday outfielders, Carl Steward of the Bay Area News Group writes.  Marvin Benard (a 50th round pick in 1992), was the last Giants draftee to play as a full-time starting outfielder for more than one season.  Part of the issue is that San Francisco has acquired so many notable outfielders in free agency and trades, ranging from Barry Bonds to Hunter Pence.  “There are things that you do that de-emphasize young players at those outfield positions,” GM Bobby Evans said.  “At the same time, I still think you should require opportunity for these guys to break through.  It may be an area where we haven’t emphasized it as much because we’ve had other options from other sources.  I just think it’s harder to patient sometimes with outfielders because there are so many other alternatives in terms of the free agent market and trades.”  Jarrett Parker and Mac Williamson are looking to break the “curse” as the two youngsters battle for the left field job this spring.
  • The Padres have so many prospects in camp after their international spending splurge that  some players (including highly-touted Cuban lefty Adrian Morejon) have been used in simulated games since they don’t have enough roster space for proper minor league games, ESPN’s Keith Law writes in his latest subscription-only piece.  Law provides an in-person analysis of several Padres and Dodgers prospects, with particularly good reviews given to Morejon, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Dodgers righty Walker Buehler.

Padres, Adrian Morejon Agree To $11MM Bonus

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5:05pm: Badler has an updated scouting report on Morejon and some details on the contract. Morejon’s deal is structured as a 2017 contract, according to Badler, so he won’t play in any official games for San Diego this year. Rather, he’ll spend the next two months pitching in simulated games at the Padres’ academy in the Dominican Republic and then report to the instructional league in September. The structuring of the contract means that they’ll have an extra year before it’s necessary to add him to the 40-man roster as protection from the Rule 5 Draft. Despite his youth, Morejon could be pitching for one of the Padres’ Class-A affiliates next season, Badler adds. The free report has plenty of additional info on Morejon and some quotes from an international scouting director, so it’s well worth a full read-through.

3:55pm: The Padres have agreed to a deal with Cuban left-hander Adrian Morejon that will pay the 17-year-old an enormous $11MM bonus, reports MLB.com’s Jesse Sanchez (via Twitter). Morejon was formally declared a free agent by Major League Baseball just yesterday. Baseball America’s Ben Badler wrote back in May that the Padres were the favorites to sign Morejon, and Sanchez said the same yesterday when reporting that Morejon had become eligible to sign.

San Diego has already soared past its league-allotted bonus pool, meaning that they’ll pay a 100 percent luxury tax on the signing. As such, Morejon effectively costs the club $22MM. The Padres last week signed 10 of international prospects (including a few of the top names on this year’s market), and while the terms of each agreement aren’t yet available, those expenditures topped $12.5MM. Morejon’s bonus is far and away the largest of the bunch.

Morejon was absent from the rankings of Sanchez and Badler due to the fact that he wasn’t technically a free agent when those reports were published. However, Sanchez notes in his tweet that he’d have ranked Morejon as the No. 2 prospect on this year’s market, and Fangraphs’ Eric Longenhagen agreed when ranking the international prospects on Fangraphs’ sortable scouting board. Longenhagen’s projections give Morejon the chance to have three plus pitches — fastball, curveball and changeup — with above-average command. He currently sits 89-92 mph with his heater and tops out at 94, per Longenhagen, though given his age, he’s of course quite a ways from realizing that potential. Badler called him one of the best Cuban players available to MLB clubs back in February (Morejon had already left Cuba but was not yet a free agent at that point), writing that scouts to whom he spoke believed Morejon to be a more promising prospect than the considerably more-talked-about Lazaro Armenteros.

The Padres were allotted a bonus pool of $3.347MM, meaning they’ll be faced with more than $20MM worth of luxury tax penalties even if their spending stops today. Given the aggressive nature of their run at this year’s crop of international talent, though, it seems unlikely that the Padres will call it a day right now. They’ll be barred from signing any international amateurs for more than $300K in each of the next two signing periods due to their overspending, so it makes sense to continue to aggressively pursue talent between now and June 15, 2017, when the current international signing period comes to a close.

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