{"id":1043,"date":"2011-01-14T17:23:03","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T21:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/?p=1043"},"modified":"2011-01-14T17:23:03","modified_gmt":"2011-01-14T21:23:03","slug":"matt-anderson-gets-a-spring-invite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/2011\/01\/14\/matt-anderson-gets-a-spring-invite\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Anderson gets a spring invite"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/_QPRJwNv0MjA\/Rd-tVgIDOEI\/AAAAAAAAAIw\/2jXdq8sNJDs\/s400\/AAFN012~Matt-Anderson-Photofile-Posters.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"400\" \/>Every year there is some player who signs a minor league contract that just surprises you. It&#8217;s not because the player was good or has upside, nope it&#8217;s because you thought the guy was dead.<\/p>\n<p>Matt Anderson is that guy this year. The 34-year-old was the top pick in the 1997 draft by the Tigers and  later closed for Detroit. Anderson was a curious first round choice by the Tigers because he was exclusively a reliever in college prior to the draft and that a team would take a relief prospect first overall simply made no sense to anyone.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t long before Anderson proved that the Tigers didn&#8217;t know what they were doing in the 1997 draft. While he did stick in the majors for a few years he was mediocre at best.\u00a0 He had&#8230; er has a career 5.19 ERA in the big leagues in 257 games.<\/p>\n<p>Five years removed from his last big league pitch Anderson has inked a minor league deal with the Philadelphia Phillies. Which begs the question&#8230; Is he going to be used as organizational depth or put in a cage as some sort of carnival oddity at minor league stadiums?<\/p>\n<p>Andersons last two stops in the minors were horrors themselves. He wasn&#8217;t highly thought of during his run in the majors and hasn&#8217;t shown anyone any reason to think he&#8217;s got anything more going this time.<\/p>\n<p>Who knows what could have been had he not thrown that octopus?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every year there is some player who signs a minor league contract that just surprises you. It&#8217;s not because the player was good or has upside, nope it&#8217;s because you thought the guy was dead. Matt Anderson is that guy this year. The 34-year-old was the top pick in the 1997 draft by the Tigers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[59,410,510],"coauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1043","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-baseball","8":"tag-matt-anderson","9":"tag-philadelphia-phillies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1043"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}