Blue Jays Morning Brew: Kottaras, Norris, Lind, Lawrie, Cabrera, Castro

It’s been about a week since we last did one of these so let’s get right into this – here are your latest* Toronto Blue Jays news and rumours.

Leading off (and a day or two late*), according to Bob Elliott of the Toronto Sun the Toronto Blue Jays will likely sign Canadian catcher George Kottaras. Kottaras, 31, has been DFA’d twice this season and most recently was released by the St. Louis Cardinals at the end of July. He’s a sabermetric darling who, thanks to his power and obscene walk rate, has managed to put up around league average offensive numbers in what works out to be about a season and a third worth of plate appearances. Ewan Ross of Blue Jays Plus wrote an article in November about why the Jays should sign Kottaras, who even has experience catching a knuckleballer (Tim Wakefield).

In other news, left-handed pitching prospect Daniel Norris tweeted last night that he’s been called up to Triple-A. Norris made eight starts at Double-A, with a mixed bag of results, but apparently the Blue Jays have something against prospects pitching in the Eastern League this season. Either that, or they’ve committed to making New Hampshire as unwatchable as possible. Lame jokes aside, the Blue Jays have been uber-aggressive with pitching promotions this season (after being notoriously slow to advance players in the past) and you would have to think there’s a good chance we see Norris in the Show when rosters expand.

Shi Davidi of Sportsnet reports that Adam Lind will begin his rehab assignment tomorrow in the GCL. Barry Davis, also of Sportsnet adds that if all goes well the hope is Lind can return to the Blue Jays for their series next week in Seattle.

Apparently John Gibbons has the results of Brett Lawrie‘s MRI but isn’t quite ready to share with the media yet according to John Lott of the National Post. Megan Robinson of The Fan 590 tweets that the results have been sent to doctors in Florida for a second opinion while Lott adds the Florida doctors have Lawrie’s previous MRI for an oblique injury, which will be used as a “baseline” when comparing to his new MRI. So after all that, it sounds like it might actually be an oblique injury and not a back issue. Either way, we should know more about the diagnosis soon enough.

According to Adam Rubin of ESPN New York, the Blue Jays acquired minor league pitcher Hunter Carnevale from the New York Mets for cash. Carnevale, who is 25, started the season at High-A but was demoted Low-A back in June and has struggled this season out of the bullpen with a 5.59 ERA. This is a pure minor league depth move but I’m not yet sure where he’ll be assigned.

Chris Zelkovich of Yahoo Sports’ Eh Game blog looks at the big TV numbers the Blue Jays have put up over the past few days after notably drawing nearly 1.1 million viewers for a Tuesday night game against the Boston Red Sox last week. Now if only their owner realized that by opening up the budget for the rest of this year just a bit, it could pay off big in a city (and country) that is starving for the shot at a championship.

And closing out with a pair excellent pieces, Kyle Matte of DJF looks at what the Blue Jays options are when it comes to Melky Cabrera and Charlie Caskey of the Vancouver Sun looks at the recent promotion of former C’s pitcher Miguel Castro.

—

*Latest being a relative term.