Oakland Athletics Make First Round of Roster Cuts
By Jason Burke
Lance Iversen-USA TODAY Sports
The deeper we get into the spring, the more clear the Opening Day roster becomes. The first round of cuts didn’t produce any major shocks, but did include some big-time future talents.
According to Athletics’ beat writer Susan Slusser’s twitter feed the following players were either officially cut, or seen packing up.
OF- Shane Peterson
SP- Andrew Werner (From the Tyson Ross trade a couple years back)
RP- Jose Flores
RP- Jeremy McBryde
All of these players were officially cut, according to Slusser. She also said that Maxwell made a very good impression while he was in camp. Maxwell is a 23 year-old, drafted in 2012 by the A’s in the 2nd round.
Werner had a 0.00 ERA according to baseball reference, but on average he was facing Double-A caliber hitters.
Jose Flores has great stuff, according to his stats. In Double-A Akron last season, he posted 11.8 K/9 which is outstanding. Anything above a “9” in this category is pretty impressive. To elaborate, the K/9 is a measure of how many batters a pitcher strikes out every 9 innings. 9 basically adds up to one batter an inning. The problem Flores seemed to have was his control. He also had a high walk rate at 3.7 over 9 innings. He is only 24, so we may see him in Oakland before long blowing people away. First, he needs to lower that walk rate.
Lastly, Michael Ynoa and Raul Alcantara were seen packing up their belongings. Ynoa appeared in last year’s All-Star Futures Game in New York. He had a rough outing, getting the loss in the game. This spring he tallied a 9.00 ERA in 3 IP, facing between High A and Double-A batters. He probably has another year or two before getting a real shot at the big leagues. Again, according to Slusser, Alcantara impressed the A’s with his sharpness in his first big-league camp.
None of these moves has been relatively surprising, but the next round of cuts should be interesting. There are a lot of players that are out of options, and will most likely be moving on to other teams. Michael Taylor could be one of those players. He is most likely 5th on the depth chart with Craig Gentry hurting. Sam Fuld has impressed enough this spring and would most likely get the call before Taylor. When Gentry is healthy, Taylor moves down to 6th with Billy Burns close on his heals, and with plenty of options.