The Braves bullpen may be swelling at the seams with potential candidates, especially those who throw with their right arms, but that isn’t stopping John Coppolella and the team’s bevy of scouts from trying to bolster their ranks with value from unorthodox places.
On today’s agenda as far as names you probably haven’t heard before is Elian Leyva (Delgado), a 26-year-old right-handed hurler from Cuba.
Atlanta Braves (@Braves) have signed RHP Elian Leyva (@elianleyva1989) to a minor league contract.
— MiLB Roster Tracker (@MiLB_Tracker) November 14, 2016
Leyva had pitched for nine seasons with the Serie Nacional (Cuban National Series) between 2007 and 2014, almost entirely as a reliever, compiling a fairly unseemly 5.68 ERA and 90/100 K/BB ratio in the process.
More recently, however, Leyva went from the Serie Nacional to the baseball league in Spain (yes, Virginia, such a thing exists), where he played for CB Barcelona. His performance there may have been what caught the Braves’ eye: he put up an ERA of 0.70 in ten outings (64 innings) for Barcelona, including a ridiculous 82/17 K/BB ratio. No clue whether it just happens to be an extreme pitchers’ league, however.
After that stint, some things on the internet suggest that Leyva signed with the Rojos del Aguila de Veracruz of the Mexican League, but whether he got into any games there is not self-evident, and the roster for the Rojos does not list his name (nor does MiLB.com have a player page for him.)
In any case, a potentially interesting story if anything comes of it, and it isn’t costing the Braves anything substantial. The Braves will likely make a lot of similar moves in order to try to find other diamonds in the rough as they approach Spring Training 2017.