Friday, January 9, 2009

Rays Notes

Tampa Bay RaysFormer Ray Dan Johnson has signed a one-year contract worth $1.2 million with the Yokohama BayStars of Japan's Central League. That's $700,000 more than Rocco Baldelli reportedly will receive in base salary from the Boston Red Sox.

Peter Toms has an excellent article at The Biz of Baseball detailing the growing relationships between Major League clubs and their minor league affiliates.

Tom Haudricourt reports at Baseball America that the Milwaukee Brewers were interested in Eduardo Morlan long before the Rule V Draft: "The Brewers originally tried to pry away Morlan from the Rays early in the 2008 season when they dealt outfielder Gabe Gross to Tampa Bay. At that point, the Rays did not want to part with the native of Cuba."

Jino Gonzalez may be in some trouble. The Rays 46th round pick in the 2002 draft, who pitched for the Montgomery Biscuits (AA) last year, was arrested January 4th at Tampa International Airport. He was charged with one count of carrying a concealed firearm and released the same day on a $2,000 surety bond. No court date has been set according to the Court's docket.

So far there are no Rays on Team USA's roster for the upcoming World Baseball Classic. Provisional rosters are due January 16th and final rosters will be determined by February 24th.

Marc Lancaster reports the Rays have claimed Dewon Day off waivers from the Boston Red Sox. The Rays 40-man roster is now full.

RaysIndex reports that The Professor will be appearing in next week's season premiere of Friday Night Lights.
-- By Doug Milhoan at 3:51 PM

2 comments:

  1. So the Rays pretty much knew that the Brewers were going to take Morlan in the rule V, yet they still didn't protect him which seemingly could have been simply done by dropping Ryu from the 40 man. What are your thoughts on this? He just isn't that good? There is an injury problem?
    I find the whole situation very odd.
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  2. This may work out for the best. With the signing of Kapler, someone has to be dropped from the 40-man (signing Dewon Day made it a full 40). So it might have been Morlan (if we had added him to prevent the Rule 5 loss). If we had to drop him now, any team could pick him up and put him in the minors, and we would not be able to get him back. As it is, Milwaukee has to keep him in the majors all year or give him back, which is a fair possibility.

    Now, the above is assuming we would have had to drop Morlan to sign Kapler, which isn't necessarily the case. We could have dropped Ryu in December and added Morlan, then dropped Salas when we signed Kapler.

    The Rays have only said positive things about Morlan, so I don't know why they left him exposed. Maybe they think they will get him returned from Milwaukee, or maybe they just weren't that impressed with him after acquiring him from Minnesota. I don't think an injury played into it, his velocity was back up in the winter leagues after being down during the regular season.
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