FLASH: Mets sign OF Desmond Jennings to Minor League Contract

     The Mets have announced that they have signed former Tampa Bay Rays OF Desmond Jennings to a minor league contract. Jennings will be assigned to AAA Las Vegas. With injuries to both Juan Lagares and Brandon Nimmo, the club was left with no backup CF on the Major League roster causing them to bring Michael Conforto up to Queens with the club. With Conforto in Queens this left Las Vegas with no starting OR backup CF on the roster.

     Desmond Jennings was a solid starting outfielder for the Rays from 2012 - 2014 posting WARs of +3.3, +2.9, and +3.2 in those respective seasons. During those season Jennings posted an average stat line of .248 AVG, .716 OPS with 12 HR, 46 RBI, and 22 SB per season. Unfortunately, Jennings career was derailed after only 28 games in 2015 due to multiple knee injuries that required surgery. He returned to the field in 2016 but was limited to only 65 games due to a bone bruise on his surgically repaired knee and a hamstring strain.

     The Rays reluctantly released Jennings this off-season citing his frustrating inability to stay on the field. According to Rays baseball operations president Matt Silverman, "When healthy, he can impact the game in so many ways. But going back a couple of years, he just hasn't been able to stay on the field for long stretches of time. There was never any question if (he) has the talent and athleticism to play. His dynamic combination of speed and power is one of the game's rarest commodities. When he's on the field, he's got the chance to be the best player on the field."

Baseball – Steve Yeager, Desmond Jennings, Wes Covington, Pay Phones

Drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1967 as an 18-year-old out of Meadow Dale High School in Dayton, Ohio, Stephen Wayne Yeager (born on November 24, 1948, in Huntington, West Virginia) became part of the franchise’s great youth movement of the late 1960s. For a stretch of four or five years, Yeager moved through the farm system alongside teammates like Ron Cey, Bill Buckner, Steve Garvey, Joe Ferguson, and Davey Lopes from the Dodgers’ famed 1968 draft class. As a sign of the type of player he would become, in 1969, while playing with the Dodgers’ Class A team in Bakersfield in June, Yeager suffered a fractured leg in a first-inning collision at home plate with a baserunner. Unaware of the nature of the injury, he finished the game.i It was the first of many injuries that would add to Yeager’s reputation for toughness and solid defensive skills at the catcher position. It was also the first of many injuries that would cut into his playing time and allowed other players to leapfrog over him in the Dodgers’ system. http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/69e2594b

Desmond Jennings: First the negatives: Jennings hit .160/.258/.245 in September, so it’s possible pitchers caught up to him after his fast start. Moreover, Tropicana Field has ranked 29th and 30th when it comes to hitters’ parks over the past two seasons, for what that’s worth. Now the positives: Jennings racked up 10 homers and 20 steals in just 247 at-bats last year, which reveals quite a bit of upside. I’m not a huge fan of paying for unproven players, but Jennings is 25 with an extensive minor league track record. Even during his terrible September, he managed two homers and six stolen bases, which reveals a high floor. Maybe he takes the career path of his teammate B.J. Upton, who gives you around 20 homers and 40 steals with a poor batting average. Or maybe he hits .290 with more of both, especially the steals, which could approach 50-plus. When you get past the third round of drafts, few stand out, and it becomes something of a dice roll  when it comes to hitters. Why not grab one with first-round-type upside? http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/fantasy-focus-early-targets/#more-57015

Wes Covington (b. 1932) was a good hitting outfielder, most notably the Braves and Phillies.  Not known for his fielding, he made two great catches in the 1957 World Series to help the Braves beat the Yankees.  He had a unique batting stance, in which he "crouched over with bat held parallel to the ground."  He clashed with manager Gene Mauch, who said he was prone to "pop off and pop up." fairandunbalancedblog.  

Baseball Prospectus reminds us of a nice little project that Pepper Hastings, the senior editor of Beckett Baseball Monthly; set out to complete. Pepper wanted to obtain a working pay phone number for each of the 26 stadiums in Major League Baseball. This wreaks of the same kind of classic retro workflows without automation like the score-keeping of fantasy baseball leagues (I still know of one guy who does it that way for traditions sake) and All-Star voting being done solely on the paper ballots that were handed out at the ballpark. I miss early 90′s baseball, and the innocence we all had back then. There are times when I wish we didn’t have the convenience of a few taps of our smartphones to know a guy’s complete stat line for the night, how many fastballs he threw, and every team’s score in the league for the evening. I want to go back to the payphone era. http://diamondhoggers.com/2012/02/14/in-1990-pay-phones-were-our-only-bridge-to-the-live-baseball-world/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter