With under a month to go before spring training begins, transactions around Major League Baseball have begun to pick up in earnest.
Longtime New York Mets minor-leaguer Luke Ritter was among the hundreds of free agents looking for new teams this offseason. He’d spent the last six seasons in the Mets organization, but after surveying his options, it became evident that a change of scenery was the best career move.
According to the official transactions log on his roster page, Ritter signed with the Los Angeles Angels on Jan. 12, though the deal was not reflected on the page until at least a week later.
Ritter, 28, played 313 games for Triple-A Syracuse over the last three years. He put up a respectable .767 OPS and 52 home runs in those games, but New York’s major league infield was clogged, and that wasn’t going to change this year with the arrivals of Marcus Semien, Bo Bichette, and Jorge Polanco.
Meanwhile, the Angels could be holding open auditions in spring training for the second- and third-base jobs, and even if Ritter doesn’t win one then, there’s a better chance that someone could underperform early in the season and open the door for him to make his major league debut.
Once a seventh-round pick out of Wichita State, Ritter has been on a baseball odyssey all over the state of New York since he signed with the Mets. Perhaps he’ll welcome a change of scenery to the West Coast, where games will certainly be played in warmer weather early in the year.
Meanwhile, the Mets also lost top prospect Jett Williams as a prospect at second base in the Freddy Peralta trade on Wednesday night, so perhaps a time could come when they miss having Ritter as a depth option.
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