CPBL Foreign Players Updates Volume #93
Chinatrust Brothers News: Casey Harman
On June 26, the Chinatrust Brothers have signed left-hander Casey Harman from the Mexican League as the team’s fourth backup foreign pitcher.
Although the Brothers have not “officially” announced the new pitcher’s name, the team pretty much confirmed it is Casey Harman in a way. Below is the translation of the press release.
“In preparation for the second-half season, the Brothers have signed a new foreign pitcher from the Mexican League. He is a left-handed pitcher and has an 8-1 record in the LMB.”
After having a quick look at the current LMB pitching stats, there is only Casey Harman fits the description with an 8-1 record.
Harman, the 30-year-old lefty spent 2010 to 2012 within the Chicago Cubs system reaching Double-A. After leaving the affiliated ball, he went on and pitched in the Can-Am League, American Association, Atlantic League and the Mexican League from 2013 to 2019.
Prior to the signing with the Brothers, Casey Harman pitched for the Pericos de Puebla in the LMB and posted a 4.57 ERA and 1.30 WHIP across 69 innings of work.
Former Teammates of Mitch Lively, Alex Liddi
While looking at the stats for Casey Harman, we saw he was on the same team with Mitch Lively and Alex Liddi during his time in the Mexican Winter League. Talk about small world, they are now teammates once again at the other side of the world.
Further Readings
Foreign players come and goes, therefore we compiled a foreign players tracker to keep track of all the foreign players signing for the 2019 CPBL season.
Any idea how the Brothers acquired Harman’s rights? I had noticed Harman on the milb.com stats pages, and thought he might be a good candidate for CPBL in 2020, if he continued to pitch well in Mexico. It’s surprising that Puebla would let him go, because the team is playing well this year and will likely make it the post season.
I guess it is one of the biggest mystery right now, I would also like to know that too. You kept hearing from Taiwan’s online baseball community saying it is no longer easy to sign players out of the LMB, but for some reasons the teams here are able to do that.
I asked one of the Mexican League journalist about this before and he told me from his understanding, the CPBL teams generally don’t pay the buyout fee.
I guess they must have some sort of escape clause in their contract before signing with the LMB?
Hopefully we can see some news coming out of Mexico about this. Like how I found out about Mitch Lively signed a 6 month deal with the Brothers earlier this year.
I saw that Ryan Bollinger pitched a good game today against Lamigo. That’s two strong starts are getting hit hard in this first CPBL start. Maybe he’ll give Fubon a boost in the Second Half.
Bollinger reminds me of Andy Sisco, tall LHP throws hard but not accurate sometime.
The strike zone last night was quite friendly to the pitchers. His curveball looked decent, was able to throw that for strike against left-handed batters. But still the same problems as previous starts, every now and then he suddenly lost his accuracy when there are runners on bases.
We will see how he goes when the 2nd-half season begin. Give him another 3 or so starts he will starting to get a feel of how to pitch in Taiwan. If he can fix that “sudden lost of accuracy” issues, I can see him doing well in Taiwan. At this stage, based on what I saw, I’m still a bit on the fence about him due to his command.
Matthew Grimes made his farm team debut yesterday. 5IP, 6H on 80 pitches. Changeup look good, fastball around 142kph but maybe it will get faster down the line.