In what is clearly the biggest news story of the day — nope, nothing else happened, I promise, nothing bizarre or riveting — we have yet another player coming to camp with the Dodgers, and once again it’s broken by a beat writer from the player’s former team. This time it’s righty reliever Peter Moylan who has signed a minor-league deal with the Dodgers, at least according to MLB.com Braves writer Mark Bowman. No word yet on if there’s a camp invite, though I’m guessing there is.
Moylan’s an Australian who turned 34 earlier this month, and he’s been with Atlanta for his entire career, getting into 295 games dating back to 2006. Of course, that workload has been fantastically inconsistent. Three times (2007, 2009-10) he’s been in 80 games or more, but he also missed nearly all of 2008 with Tommy John surgery and most of 2011 after back surgery, then spent most of 2012 in the minors recovering from October 2011 shoulder surgery.
When healthy, Moylan’s a sidearming groundball machine (63.9% career) who is basically a ROOGY, given his career success against righties (.213/.273/.301) as opposed to struggles against lefties (.278/.408/.381).
Now, whether he has anything left after years of heavy usage and injuries remains to be seen. Maybe he’s just a camp arm that we never hear from again, this year’s John Grabow. But I know I’ll be rooting for him, because he’s a sidearmer, an Aussie, a noted practical joker, a prolific Tweeter, tattooed to the point that he looks like he should be a roadie for Motorhead, and — perhaps most importantly — he hates Nickelback:
Peter Moylan is a reliever for the Atlanta Braves, apparently. I follow the greatest franchise in the history of sports, so you know, he’s not really on my radar. Anyway, this Moylan guy must have gotten back from a Foo Fighters concert and decided Nickelback needed a kick in the ass. The tweet reads “Note to @nickelback please attend a @foofighters concert. That’s how’s it should be done chad.”
I think I love him already.
