Sometimes, the Major League Baseball offseason works out in mysterious ways.
Infielder Brett Wisely finished his regular season as a member of the Atlanta Braves and worked out for most of the offseason with the belief that he would return to Atlanta. But on Jan. 9, he was designated for assignment and subsequently traded to the Tampa Bay Rays.
As it turned out, though, the Rays wouldn’t have space for Wisely on the 40-man roster for long. And when Tampa Bay’s roster crunch came, the Braves were able to open up some space of their own thanks to injuries.
On Tuesday evening, the Braves re-acquired Wisely from the Rays for cash considerations. Wisely spent just one month in the Rays organization, and never got to wear the uniform for an official workout.
To clear space for Wisely on the 40-man roster, the Braves announced that reliever Joe Jiménez was being placed on the 60-day injured list with a left articular cartilage injury in his knee, a tough blow to the bullpen this early in the spring.
Wisely spent the first 164 games of his major league career with the San Francisco Giants before getting into four games for the Braves in September. He’s a career .214 hitter with a .584 OPS, and although his results have generally been better at the upper levels of the minors, his best-case scenario is probably a glove-first utility role.
As the Braves enter the season with some uncertainty around the shortstop position, however, the glove-first nature of Wisely’s game makes him useful to have around, even if he’s played a lot more second base than shortstop thus far at the major league level.
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