The Dodgers have selected the contract of left-hander Victor Gonzalez from Triple-A Oklahoma City, the team announced. The move puts Gonzalez on the 40-man roster and protects him from being selected in the Rule 5 draft.
The 23-year-old Gonzalez isn’t ranked within MLB.com’s ranking of the Dodgers’ top 30 prospects, and he only just cracked the Triple-A level this year, tossing 14 innings for Oklahoma City. Nevertheless, the L.A. front office felt he was worth keeping given Gonzalez’s impressive numbers across three minor league levels in 2019.
Beginning the year in high-A ball and ending in Triple-A, Gonzalez posted a cumulative 2.31 ERA, 9.3 K/9, and 2.91 K/BB rate over 89 2/3 innings. Though Gonzalez started 13 of his 38 total appearances this season, he worked exclusively as a reliever in 15 Triple-A outings, and bullpen work is probably Gonzalez’s likeliest path to a possible big league debut in 2020.
With Gonzalez added, the Dodgers now have 38 players on their 40-man roster. Teams have until November 20 to finalize their 40-man rosters in advance of the Rule 5 draft, which takes place on December 12.
Victorious Victor! You are one step closer to the league of major baseballs.
huh, not a player i can say ive heard of. looks like an interesting one though.
Finally. Now we are rolling. LOL
Next year’s bullpen strategy takes form and it looks amazingly like last year’s bullpen strategy.
About 36 hours into the offseason. Im sure its all they will do.
Oh no, I’m sure they will also head hunt a bunch of relievers who weren’t good enough to stick with any other team.
I thought we LAD fans “demanded” performance?
Why are we paying these guys all this money to lose?
Tampa contended for 1/3 of the payroll.
Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that what happened to the Red Sox and it’s need to “cut” payroll in 2020 will soon be happening to LAD.
I want this team to win.
Not paint themselves into a financial corner with overpriced players.
If Tampa can do what they did with a fraction of the payroll then why can’t all the “genius’s in the LAD organization win with 3 times Tampa’s payroll?
And “soon” to likely be 4 times Tampa’s payroll.
The Dodgers payroll has been declining pretty steadily for the last five seasons, since it peaked in 2014. Some of us have come to understand that this trend is the plan, especially since it became known that they don’t intend to pay the CBT again. This year they will have to increase their payroll base by maybe $50M just to cover arbitration alone. This will leave little room for plugging roster gaps with free agents. This is why they are taking up a value roster spot to protect a nobody relief pitcher. They are looking for the next Yimi Garcia (mediocre but cheap) when they should be looking for someone a lot better. So we fans can demand whatever we want, management isn’t listening.
Oh, and in other Dodger news not reported here, four days ago Kenley Jansen surprised exactly nobody by not opting out of the last two years of his contract. So now we know for sure that the Dodgers are stuck with two more years of a closer who can’t close. What’s the plan there, I wonder?