Biloxi cleans up with Southern League honors
CINCINNATI - The Biloxi Shuckers, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Class AA affiliate, made it a clean sweep of the Southern League’s major individual awards on Wednesday.
Outfielder Corey Ray was named most valuable player, right-hander Zack Brown was named most outstanding pitcher and Mike Guerrero was named manager of the year for Biloxi, which won the first-half championship and is in the lead for the second half with five games remaining.
Ray, the fifth overall pick by the Brewers out of the University of Louisville in 2016, became the first Shuckers player to be named the Southern League’s top player in the four years of the franchise’s existence.
He entered Wednesday leading the league in home runs with 27, stolen bases with 35, doubles with 32, extrabase hits with 66, slugging percentage at.485, total bases with 249, games played with 130 and at-bats with 513.
It’s been a tremendous bounceback year for Ray, who turns 24 on Sept. 22. He struggled a season ago at advanced A Carolina while working his way back from the left knee surgery he underwent in the Fall of 2016 only months after he was drafted.
Manager Craig Counsell got to see Ray up close in spring training in 2017 when he was rehabbing with the major-league team and again in March when Ray got seven at-bats as a lategame fill-in during several Cactus League games.
“Anytime a guy’s in Double-A, he’s not too far down the line. Then you’re talking about the MVP of a league – that’s a great honor,” he said. “For Corey, I think health played into this, for sure. He had a knee injury. He was healthy in 2017 but probably didn’t have the year that he wanted.
“I think a fully healthy Corey Ray has shown he can do some pretty big things.”
Brown, a fifth-round pick out of the University of Kentucky in that same 2016 draft, is 9-1 with a 2.48 earned run average and WHIP of 1.05. He’s struck out 113 in 119 2/3 innings over 21 appearances (20 starts) and is limiting batters to a .208 average.
His ERA and winning percentage lead the league.
The 23-year-old Brown also came an out away from throwing a no-hitter on June 15.
Guerrero, meanwhile, has led Biloxi to a league- and franchise-high-tying 78 victories. The Shuckers went 41-29 to win the first-half South Division title and earn Biloxi’s second trip to the postseason.
Biloxi entered Wednesday 38-27 in the second half, one-half game ahead of Pensacola.
Guerrero has compiled a 221-190 record with the Shuckers, leading the team to a winning record in all three seasons.
In addition, Ray, Brown and closer Nate Griep were named postseason all-stars. Griep, a right-hander drafted out of Kansas State in the eighth round in 2015, is 2-1 with a 3.42 ERA and a league-best 33 saves.
Up in the air: The final 48 hours or so before the deadline for trading players and having them eligible for postseason play will have featured a couple interesting scenarios for the Brewers.
First, they faced Cincinnati’s Matt Harvey on Wednesday at Great American Ball Park. Reports had the Brewers and Reds on the verge of a trade for the right-hander last week, only to have the deal fall apart.
Now this weekend they’ll travel to Washington for a three-game series against the Nationals, who have waved the white flag on the season and have been moving players.
One of those, Gio Gonzalez, has reportedly cleared trade waivers and is the target of several interested teams. One of those could be the Brewers, who have seen their starting pitching falter badly over the last month.
Gonzalez, 32, is in the final year of a contract paying him $12 million. He hasn’t had a terrific season – 7-11 with a 4.35 ERA in 26 starts – but Gonzalez is a left-hander with experience in big games and might still be a good fit with Milwaukee.
General manager David Stearns was asked about a possible move during an interview on MLB Network Radio earlier Wednesday.
“At this point, I just don’t know,” he said. “You generally know who has cleared waivers, so you know, more or less, what the player universe is out there and available to be traded. We are having conversations. I think most contending clubs are having conversations. But the price also needs to be right, obviously.”