Bulls Pick up Two (Three!) MiLBY’s

What’s a MiLBY you may ask? Well, the answer is: Minor League Baseball Yearly Award. Given out by MLB.com. The Bulls won one as a team and Winston Abreu won one as a player. The awards were announced in late December, but I’m just getting around putting them up here.

First off, the Bulls won a MiLBY as the Triple-A team of the season. Lisa Winston wrote it up for MLB.com. She apparently caught Charlie Montoyo in a much more talkative mood than usual.

The entire article is at the link, but a couple of key quotes stand out:

For example, Charlie claims not to pay much attention to an opposing team’s record, instead he just looks at recent transactions:

The knowledge that Triple-A is where all the changes occur, the players move up, the players move down, has taught Montoyo an important lesson: When scouting the opposition, he never looks at the team’s record or even the standings. He only looks at their recent transactions.

“By the time you play a team, it’s not the same team as it was earlier, so that’s why I never talk about the other team’s record,” Montoyo said. “It’s not because I’m superstitious.”

Charlie also explained what I was calling the “Montoyo Merry-go-round” last year. According to him,

“I always thought I’d be a decent Triple-A manager because, after five seasons at Triple-A, I know what it’s like when you don’t play,” he said. “So on my team, everyone plays. No one goes more than two days without playing. Everyone gets their chance. I treat my team the way I wanted to be treated as a player.”

And for a guy who supposedly doesn’t pay much attention to the numbers, listen to this description of the playoffs:

“In the playoffs we stole 28 out of 30 bases. We won 21 games in our final at-bats including the playoffs. We won 23 games where we were tied or behind after seven innings,” he said. “We won 37 games when the other team scored first, including five out of seven times in the playoffs. And out of 15 extra-inning games, we had four games where we went into an inning where we had run out of pitchers and won the game.”

Then there’s Winston Abreu. He got the MiLBY as the best reliever in Triple-A. No doubt in our mind that he deserved it. Readers of WDBB will remember how happy we were that Winston came back to us from Cleveland after leaving the Bulls in June, spending a few days with the Rays and then getting traded. He deserves a lot of the credit for the way the season went for us, especially the last couple of weeks and the playoffs.

Very pleased to hear that he’s finished his rehab and will be available this year. Good article at the link.

Odds and Ends

• Over at Rays Index, Cork Gaines has just wrapped up his 12 Days of Raysmas where he outlines the twelve things he’d like to see in the coming year. A fun read.

• I think, but am not sure, that winter league baseball is just about wrapped up. Of interest to Bulls fans is that Reid Brignac got in some playing time in Mexico (17 games, 60 AB, .233/.324/.267). Didn’t do anything special, so I’m a bit worried about him. Similarly, Justin Ruggiano has played in 20 games down in Venezuela, .246/.329/.348. The worrisome, if familiar number, is the high number of strikeouts, 21. Joe Bateman’s been real busy in Venezuela. He’s appeared in 25 games, apparently mostly in middle relief. 37 innings, 3.41 ERA.

• Jon Weber apparently wrapped up with a .396 batting average over 40 games and an OPS of 1.032.

Lastly, checking out the Note to Self Blog I discovered the Chris Richard had won a MilBY for his two grand slam game last year. Congrats to Chris!