Hemstitching: Free Agents, Friedman, Winter Ball

The ever-diligent Rays Prospects site has brought to our attention the Baseball America listing of minor league free agents. Bulls fans know almost all of these guys from the Rays system, as might be expected. On the list are several who saw time with the Bulls in 2011, including:

Pitchers

• Brian Baker
• Joe Bateman
• Lance Cormier
• Richard de los Santos
• Paul Phillips
• Adam Russell
• Matt Torra

Position Players

• J.J. Furmaniak
• Daniel Mayora
• Ray Olmedo
• John Matulia

Scrolling through the list we find a couple of other former Bulls including:

• Chris Carter (Braves)
• Rhyne Hughes (Orioles)
• Fernando Perez (Mets)
  
• Winston Abreu (Blue Jays)

Readers with sharper eyes (and better memories) than I should take a look and see if there’s someone important that I may have missed.

What does it mean for the Bulls? Probably not too much. These are guys whose agents will be looking to find them jobs beginning in the spring, assuming they haven’t decided to leave baseball. The Rays have been very, very smart about looking over the larger pool for possibilities and I would assume that the Bulls coaching staff would have some say on who from 2011 might fit with the Bulls in 2012.

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On a different note, over at DRaysBay there’s an interesting interview with Rays VP Andrew Friedman. Several interesting comments regarding player development made.

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Lastly, if you'd like to catch up on folks playing winter ball, here's a helpful link. Interesting are the two players with a fairly large age difference (Tim Beckham, 21, and Elliot Johnson, 27) both working so very hard (19 and 18 games, respectively).

Update: Not recent Bulls, but remembered with some fondness, pitcher Dale Thayer and outfielder Jason Pridie are leaving the Mets organization for minor league free-agency (Thanks, anon).