Image via Twitter / MazatlanMex
For professional baseball players outside the major leagues, opportunities to play and grow were a little hard to come by in 2020. With the minor league season cancelled, this year for the first time in recent memory the Brewers loaned some players to independent league teams to help them get at bats and innings and keep their skills sharp. They also held a brief fall Instructional League camp at their facilities in Phoenix, but there’s only so much that can be done in that environment to make up for lost time.
Meanwhile, international winter leagues are providing another opportunity for players who lost out on developmental time this year to get back on the field. While many of the leagues look different from their past iterations, play is underway in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Nicaragua and will soon start in Australia, and the Brewers have players participating in each of those leagues.
Brewers Vice President of Minor League Operations Tom Flanagan said it’s hard to give a firm number of how many players from the organization will take part in winter ball this year, but expects it to be similar or perhaps a bit lower than in recent years.
“There may be fewer ‘import’ (non-native players) taking part due to COVID-19 restrictions or more native players taking part and having less jobs,” Flanagan said via email on Friday. “Native players from those countries generally play for their teams each winter. And this year, a larger number of players were interested in playing, perhaps to make up for getting fewer/no game reps during the season, and this makes winter ball jobs more scarce.”
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While affiliated minor league teams are focused primarily on player development, winter ball teams are independent entities whose only goal is to win. This can create some conflict between winter league clubs and the major league organizations seeking to protect their prospects.
“We monitor them closely to ensure they are being used effectively in terms of their health – particularly for pitchers,” Flanagan said. “But getting some extra innings or AB’s can help make up for reduced game reps in 2020 and help get them ready for 2021.”
Interesting Matchups
Winter ball rosters contain players with a wide variety of experience levels, from players who have never appeared above the lowest levels of the minors to current and former major leaguers. That can create some interesting matchups and opportunities; On Friday Brewers pitcher Eddy Tavarez, who has never pitched above rookie ball, faced former MLB shortstop Richie Martin in a Puerto Rican game. Tavarez worked around some struggles with command and recorded the strikeout, drawing rave reviews from one observer.
“He’s (the Brewers’) closer of the future if he can find some command,” the observer said. “His stuff is nasty.”
In an era where most sports are easier to follow than they ever have before, coverage of winter league baseball has actually taken a step back in recent years. Portions of the page MLB created to house their winter league coverage haven’t been updated since 2018 and they’ve removed, for example, a feature allowing fans to view all of an organization’s winter league participants on one page. Video of Puerto Rican and Dominican games are both available via paid streaming services.
For some MLB teams, however, monitoring these leagues may be more important than ever. As longtime Brewers minor league chronicler Jim Goulart recently noted, 2020’s abbreviated draft and extensive minor league releases during the year left the Brewers well short of even the minimum number of position players required to fill their four full-season minor league teams in 2021. They’ll likely need to be extremely active on the minor league free agent market to fill in those gaps, and the winter leagues are the best opportunity they’ve had in a while to scout available talent in game action.
Players will come and go due to the winter leagues’ roster flexibility and frequent turnover, but current and future members of the Brewers and other major league organizations will be active in winter ball through the Caribbean Series in February. It’s not always easy to catch these games, but fans who follow them will have an opportunity to get an offseason baseball fix and perhaps see some future Brewers.
