Pirates Claim Troy Stokes Jr., Designate Nik Turley
The Pirates announced that outfielder Troy Stokes Jr. has been claimed off waivers from the Tigers. Stokes was designated for assignment by Detroit earlier this week. To create roster space, Pittsburgh has designated left-hander Nik Turley for assignment.
The Tigers claimed Stokes off waivers from the Brewers in September 2019, and the outfielder will end his Detroit tenure without suiting up a single time for any team in the organization, thanks to the cancellation of the minor league season and a broken hamate bone in July that ended his 2020 campaign before it even began.
Stokes has yet to appear in a Major League game, but he should get some opportunity on a rebuilding Pirates team. Stokes has hit .250/.351/.414 over 2355 plate appearances in Milwaukee’s farm system, with an impressive 129-for-159 record in stealing bases. While he has experience at all three outfield positions, the large majority of Stokes’ playing time has come as a left fielder.
Turley tossed 21 2/3 innings for the Pirates in 2020, posting a 4.98 ERA, 21.7 K%, and 9.8 K-BB%. Turley’s only previous MLB experience consisted of 17 2/3 innings with the 2017 Twins, but his career was interrupted by an 80-game PED suspension and then elbow problems. Turley started 139 of 176 games during his minor league career, posting a 3.43 ERA over 787 2/3 innings mostly in the Yankees’ farm system, but also seeing time with the Red Sox, Giants, and Twins.
Rangers Sign Drew Butera To Minors Contract
The Rangers have signed catcher Drew Butera to a minor league deal, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reports (via Twitter). The contract includes an invitation to the Rangers’ big league Spring Training camp. Butera will be paid $1MM in guaranteed money if he makes the MLB roster, with up to $500K more available in incentives.
Butera has played for five different clubs over his 11-year career in the bigs, most playing for the Rockies for much of the last two-plus seasons. Long considered a solid defender and game-caller, Butera has used this skillset to keep finding Major League work, as he has hit only .198/.255/.294 over 1437 career plate appearances.
Rangers GM Chris Young knows Butera well, as the two played together with the Royals from 2015-17. Butera will provide Texas with some veteran depth as the Rangers currently have two inexperienced backstops (Jose Trevino and Aramis Garcia) lined up as their top two catching options. The Rangers were known to have interest in Jason Castro earlier this winter, so a bigger-name catching addition beyond just Buters might still be in the offing.
Minor MLB Transactions: 1/12/21
Here are Tuesday’s minor moves from around the game…
- The Giants agreed to a minor league deal and Spring Training invite with utilityman Arismendy Alcantara, reports Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area. Once considered to be among baseball’s top 100 prospects, the former Cubs prospect hasn’t appeared in the Majors since 2017. The 29-year-old Alcantara has appeared in 167 MLB games, splitting time between the Cubs, A’s and Reds, but he has just a .189/.285/.315 batting line to show for it. Alcantara has experience at second base, shortstop, third base and all three outfield spots, and he’s a career .273/.326/.468 hitter in parts of four Triple-A seasons.
Diamondbacks Sign Seven To Minor League Deals
The Diamondbacks announced the signing of seven players to minor league deals: Bryan Holaday, Seth Frankoff (previously reported), Bradley Roney, Sam Moll, Drew Weeks, Christian Lopes, and Jamie Ritchie, per Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic (via Twitter).
Out of this group, only Holaday, Frankoff and Moll have appeared in the majors. Holaday carries the most experience, having amassed 768 plate appearances with multiple teams (including 33 with the Orioles last season). The 33-year-old owns a .238/.283/.333 line with 10 home runs in the bigs. Moll, 29, has only appeared in MLB in one season – 2017, when he totaled 6 2/3 innings as a member of the Athletics. He has pitched to a much larger sample size of 131 innings in Triple-A and logged a 4.19 ERA.
Among the players here who haven’t reached the majors, Lopes earned the highest marks as a prospect, as Baseball America ranked the former seventh-round pick 23rd in the Blue Jays’ farm system in 2013. Lopes is now 28, though, and didn’t move beyond Triple-A ball with the Jays or the Rangers. He hit .272/.364/.426 with five HRs over 228 PA with the Rangers’ Triple-A team in 2019.
KBO’s NC Dinos To Sign Wes Parsons
The NC Dinos of the KBO have announced the signing of right-hander Wes Parsons. He will now begin the process of completing a physical and traveling to Changwon to self-isolate before joining the team.
The 28-year-old right-hander can earn up to $600K in the form of a $320K base salary, $80K signing bonus, and $200K in incentives, writes Yoo Hee-ho of the Yonhap News Agency. Parsons will join the Dinos rotation. With Drew Rucinski and Aaron Altherr already on board, the Dinos now have a full slate of foreign players for the 2021 season. The Dinos are embarking on their title defense season after winning their first-ever KBO championship last year.
Parsons originally signed with the Atlanta Braves in 2012 as an undrafted amateur free agent. He made his big league debut in 2018 for the Braves. His five-inning outing was his only appearance of the season. After 17 appearances spanning 15 1/3 innings with a 3.52 ERA/6.08 FIP in 2019, the Rockies selected Parsons off waivers. He made another 15 appearances in Colorado, pitching to a 6.98 ERA/7.09 FIP across 19 1/3 innings. Though Parsons struggled in the Majors, he produced better results in Triple-A: he worked to a 2.86 ERA/3.27 FIP with 8.6 K/9 and 3.3 BB/9 along with a 56.8% groundball rate in 2019.
NPB’s Rakuten Golden Eagles Sign Rusney Castillo
JANUARY 10: Castillo will be guaranteed $600K on the deal, reports Jon Heyman of MLB Network (Twitter link). The pact includes another $1MM in potential incentives.
JANUARY 9: Former Red Sox outfielder Rusney Castillo has signed with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles of Nippon Professional Baseball. The Eagles officially announced the move today, after reports out of Mexico last month suggested Castillo was preparing to join the Japanese team.
Castillo last played in the majors in 2016, appearing in nine games for Boston that left him with a .262/.301/.379 slash line over 337 career plate appearances from 2014-16. The big majority (289 PA) of that playing time came in 2015, when Castillo seemed ticketed for regular duty in Boston’s outfield after being called up from the minors in May, but Castillo stumbled to just a .647 OPS that season.
Though he signed a seven-year, $72.5MM deal as an international free agent in August 2014, Castillo was already on the outs with the Red Sox, as the team put him on waivers and outrighted him to Triple-A in June. This left Castillo stuck in a contractual loophole, as his salary was no longer counted against Boston’s luxury tax bill since he was outrighted. However, the new collective bargaining agreement from the 2016-17 changed these terms, so Castillo couldn’t be returned to the Red Sox 40-man roster without the entirety of his remaining contract being again counted for luxury tax purposes.
As a result, Castillo was more or less trapped at Triple-A Pawtucket to play out the remainder of his deal. He ended up posting a respectable .295/.335/.425 slash line with 42 homers over his 1973 career PA with the PawSox, and he will now head to Japan in an attempt to spark what has been a thoroughly unusual career.
Barring any changes to international signing rules in the upcoming CBA talks, Castillo’s $72.5MM deal will stand for the foreseeable future as the largest deal ever given to a Cuban free agent. It also stands out as one of the more expensive misfires in Red Sox history, though it shouldn’t be forgotten that Castillo had enough potential coming out of Cuba that almost every team in baseball had some level of interest in him back in 2014. Should Castillo play well for the Eagles, it will be interesting to see if he remains in Japan next winter or perhaps explores a return to Major League Baseball.
Yankees To Sign Tyler Lyons
The Yankees have re-signed Tyler Lyons to a minor-league contract, per the MLB.com transactions page. The veteran southpaw pitched in one game for New York last season.
Lyons has bounced on and off the Yankees’ roster a few times since he first signed with New York in August 2019. The 32-year-old has tallied 10.2 relief innings across twelve appearances in pinstripes, allowing eight earned runs. Lyons hasn’t found much success over the past three years with any of the Cardinals, Pirates or Yankees. He did, however, have a few productive seasons in St. Louis early in his career.
In spite of Lyons’ recent history, there’s no harm in bringing back a familiar player on a minor-league pact to bolster organizational depth. Aside from closer Aroldis Chapman, Zack Britton is the only lefty reliever on the Yankees’ 40-man roster.
Nationals Sign Kyle Schwarber
1:31PM: The signing has been officially announced by the Nationals. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reports that the deal also contains an $11MM mutual option for the 2022 season. That option contains a $3MM buyout, so Schwarber’s guaranteed money breaks down as that $3MM plus $7MM in salary.
9:44AM: The Nationals have signed outfielder Kyle Schwarber to a one-year contract, The Washington Post’s Jesse Dougherty reports (via Twitter). The deal will be official once Schwarber passes a physical. Schwarber will earn $10MM from the one-year pact, as per Joel Sherman of the New York Post. Schwarber is represented by Excel Sports Management.
Dougherty reported last month that the Nats were looking into Schwarber after he was non-tendered by the Cubs, with such teams as the Yankees, Angels, Blue Jays, and Twins also linked to the slugger’s market. It isn’t surprising that Schwarber generated such interest given that he had a 38-homer season in 2019, and hit .234/.337/.492 (with 94 homers) over 1606 PA with Chicago from 2017-19.
While those numbers were solid, however, they weren’t quite the elite-level production Chicago hoped to receive from a player drafted fourth overall in 2014. Schwarber’s gains with his bat were also rather mitigated by a lot of swings-and-misses (512 strikeouts from 2017-20, the 12th-most of any hitter in baseball in that stretch) and average to subpar baserunning and left field defense.
Things went south for Schwarber in 2020, as he hit only .188/.308/.393 with 11 home runs over 224 plate appearances. Between these lackluster numbers and the Cubs’ desire to cut payroll, Schwarber was non-tendered so Chicago could avoid paying him an arbitration salary projected to fall somewhere between $7.01MM and $9.3MM.
The fact that Schwarber surpassed even the highest arb projection in landing $10MM from Washington is indicative both of how much interest there must have been in his services, and a sign that the Nats are taking more stock in some of Schwarber’s advanced metrics than his bottom-line 2020 numbers. A look at Statcast indicates a solid case for a bounce-back performance, as Schwarber still made plenty of hard contact (including a 95th-percentile exit velocity of 92.8 mph). Between a .219 BABIP and a .302 wOBA that fell well beneath his above-average .330 xwOBA, it can also be argued that Schwarber ran into some bad luck over his sample size of 224 PA.
The Nationals are certainly hoping for a return for the 2017-19 version of Schwarber, as his left-handed bat would nicely augment a D.C. lineup that still leaned mostly towards right-handed hitters even after the addition of switch-hitter Josh Bell. Between Bell and Schwarber, the Nats have now added two sluggers looking for rebound seasons, and a lot of major power potential to a team that finished 21st among all clubs in home runs last year.
Juan Soto looks to be moving to right field to accommodate Schwarber, a position shift that was known to be under consideration depending on what type of corner outfielder the Nationals brought into the mix. Schwarber will surely get some DH time should the National League again use the designated hitter next season, which might have the benefit of unlocking some additional hitting potential for Schwarber since he could focus solely on hitting for those games. It also isn’t out of the question that Washington could break Schwarber in as a first baseman, as Anthony Rizzo‘s presence at the position forced the Cubs to deploy Schwarber in the outfield once Schwarber was moved from his original catcher spot.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images
Sung-Bum Na Returning To NC Dinos
Slugging Korean outfield Sung-Bum Na‘s posting period came to an end today. The 31-year-old, who has played his entire eight-year career with the NC Dinos, will return to the KBO after failing to come to an agreement with a Major League team, per a SPOTV report, writes the KBO’s Sung Min Kim (via Twitter).
Na was posted a month ago with the hopes of catching on with a Major League club. As a corner outfielder, Na already faced a steep competitive field that offers a fair swath of alternative options, but a knee injury suffered in 2019 and his age likely complicated his market. Still, he hit .324/.390/.596 for the Dinos in 2020 with 34 home runs, 25.3 percent strikeout rate, and 8.3 percent walk rate. The strikeout and walk rates likely did not work in Na’s favor, but the power is compelling.
The free agent market is an unforgiving one this offseason, however, and it might be that Na was too uncertain an asset for interested teams. The 30-day posting period also likely worked against him given the glacial pace of free agency. Ultimately, agent Scott Boras was unable to find a deal. As we saw recently with Tomoyuki Sugano, Na is not the only overseas star to face a less-welcoming financial landscape than expected. Na will now will return to the Dinos for a ninth season. He will, however, be a free agent again after 2021, notes Kim, at which point he could pursue the possibility of jumping to MLB again.
Phillies Acquire Sam Coonrod From Giants
The Phillies have acquired right-hander Sam Coonrod from the Giants in exchange for pitching prospect Carson Ragsdale, according to ESPN.com’s Kiley McDaniel and Jeff Passan (Twitter link).
Originally a fifth-round pick in the 2014 draft, Coonrod debuted in the big leagues by posting a 3.58 ERA over 27 2/3 innings for the Giants in 2019, though advanced metrics weren’t impressed by his work. That fortune turned in 2020, as while Coonrod’s advanced numbers improved, his ERA ballooned to 9.82 in 14 2/3 frames. Overall, Coonrod has a 5.74 ERA, 18.9 K%, 7 K-BB%, and 5.05 SIERA over his brief Major League career.
Coonrod missed much of the 2018 season due to Tommy John surgery but he returned from that long rehab with plenty of heat on his fastball, averaging 97.1 mph in the bigs. He was a regular starting pitcher in the minors prior to his surgery, but Coonrod could best be positioned to remain a relief pitcher for the foreseeable future.
While he may have been expendable for the Giants, the Phillies will surely take a live arm as they try to rebuild a bullpen that posted dreadful numbers in 2020. Newly-hired Phils pitching coach Caleb Cotham and bullpen coach Jim Gott will now be tasked with seeing if they can turn Coonrod’s velocity and excellent curveball spin into consistent results for the 28-year-old.
Ragsdale was Philadelphia’s fourth-round selection in the 2020 draft, so he has yet to begin his pro career. A product of the University Of South Florida, Ragsdale’s college career was interrupted by Tommy John surgery but he still posted a 3.75 ERA and a very impressive 33.6 K% over 50 1/3 NCAA innings, albeit with some control problems. MLB Pipeline ranked him as the 30th-best prospect in the Phillies’ farm system, citing his promising fastball and curve but also noting that there is still a lot of uncertainty over Ragsdale’s potential as a starter due to the lack of games in the abbreviated 2020 NCAA season.