Last night during the Dayton Dragons broadcast it was mentioned that outfielder Phillip Ervin had offseason wrist surgery. This went unreported as far as I was able to tell until last night. How a teams top draft pick and one of their top prospects has wrist surgery and it goes unreported, I don’t know, but it appears that it happened. Ervin is off to a slow start this season for the Dragons, hitting just .205 with just two walks and 13 strikeouts in 42 plate appearances. As I wrote last week though, I don’t think an injury is much of the reason for his struggles.
There is something inherently wrong with how baseball works. The Diamondbacks needed a pitcher to be called up and instead of calling up their top pitching prospect Archie Bradley, who is in Triple-A. Over at Baseball America, they looked at an interview that Bradley’s agent gave to Fox Sports where he was not happy and called out the Diamondbacks for holding Bradley back because of them not wanting to start his arbitration clock. The general manager for the team then said something strange and rubs me the wrong way:
“I think he needs more time down there as well as I don’t think it’s a proper environment,” Towers told reporters. “With what’s going on with our ball club, throwing him in here, he would be viewed as the savior. I don’t think it’s the right time. If we were playing a little better baseball, maybe. But right now I don’t want to put that on him. That’s not to say he couldn’t come up here and perform like we hope Mike does, but we don’t like the environment based on who he is and what people will think once he comes here.”
If they were playing baseball better, they would have called him up. That is basically what he is saying. So let me understand this correctly…. if you had a better team, you would try to make it better by calling up the guy you feel is the best option, but because your team isn’t as good, you won’t call him up and make them better? I understand the move from the teams perspective, I really do and it is the smart business move to make. But I don’t like it and I really don’t like that the general manager basically said if 24 other guys were better at the big league level then this kid would have a job on the big league roster instead of toiling around in Triple-A. Lie. Make something up. What you said makes you sound bad.
Marquez Smith took home the first California League Offensive Player of the Week award. The Bakersfield Blaze first baseman hit .444/.500/.917 with 19 RBI in the first 10 games of the season to grab the award.
Not minor league related at all, but I wrote an article about Jay Bruce possibly being on the verge of becoming a big time offensive threat. Go check it out.