Right-hander Tayron Guerrero has signed a minor league deal with the Angels, reports Francys Romero.
Guerrero, 33 in January, has 106 innings of major league experience but hasn’t appeared in the bigs since 2019. He signed a minor league deal with the Reds going into 2023 but was released in June after posting a dreadful 11.51 earned run average in 22 2/3 innings. That’s a small sample of work and the ERA was surely inflated by unlucky numbers in terms of batting average on balls in play and runners stranded, but he also walked more batters than he struck out.
He became popular with the Mexican League’s Diablos Rojos del Mexico after being freed. There, albeit in an even smaller sample size of 7 2/3 innings, he recorded a 1.17 ERA. After that, he went to a Mexican winter ball with Naranjeros de Hermosillo. For that team, he has pitched 16 1/3 innings with a 1.10 ERA, striking out 26 batters and walking 7, with strikeout and walk rates of 40 and 10.8%, respectively. Romero reports that Guerrero’s radar gun reading was 101.6 mph.
Guerrero’s package has always included that velocity, but he hasn’t always been able to control it. In his brief time in the major leagues, he walked 13.6% of batters faced, and in 2023, while with the Reds, he walked 18.8% of Triple-A hitters. Since being freed and leaving for Mexico, he has performed better, as evidenced by the fact that he had a decent rate with the Naranjeros and didn’t issue any walks for the Diablos.
The Angels have nothing to lose by signing him to a minor league contract and waiting to see how much control he has early in the season. Though he is currently without options and cannot make the team, Guerrero might be able to earn his way onto a roster spot if everything is going well.
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