Colorado Rockies announce their non-roster invites to Spring Training

Yesterday, the Colorado Rockies announced that their non-roster invitees to Spring Training and most of them are prospects.

The Colorado Rockies announced that they will have 17 non-roster invitees to major league camp when Spring Training starts here in a few weeks.

The highlight of them is Rockies top prospect, infielder Brendan Rodgers. Here’s the breakdown of the players by position.

Catchers (3): Anthony Bemboom, Dom Nuñez, and Jan Vázquez

Infielders (5): Daniel Castro, Garrett Hampson, Brian Mundell, Shawn O’Malley, and Brendan Rodgers

Outfielders (1): Sam Hilliard

Pitchers (8): Harrison Musgrave, Jerry Vasto, Shane Broyles, Ryan Castellani, James Farris, Austin House, Peter Lambert, Brooks Pounders

Of the 17 non-roster invitees, only O’Malley and Pounders spent 2017 outside of the Rockies organization.

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O’Malley, 30, has been in affiliated baseball since 2006 but he has only played 124 games at the major league level. None of the 124, though, were in 2017. He’s not much of a threat with the bat (.231 hitter in the majors and .262 in the minor leagues) but he is very versatile as he has played every position but pitcher, catcher, and first base in the majors.

He also has played those positions in at least ten games a piece. If this description sounds familiar to you, you could basically copy and paste this description on 2017 Rockie Alexi Amarista (gasp!).

Pounders, 27, has appeared in 24 MLB games in the past two seasons with the Royals in 2016 and the Angels in 2017. He has not done particularly well in the majors as in those 24 games, he has an ERA of 9.78 and he averaged 14.1 hits allowed per nine innings. He was much better in Triple-A in 2017 as he had an ERA of 2.63 in 38 outings.

Final Thoughts

While the Rockies could make some additions to their non-roster invitee list, in my opinion, the only player who has a remote shot at making the Rockies 25-man roster at the end of Spring Training is Brendan Rodgers.

Next: The Rockies best reliever has been here all along

Don’t get your hopes up though as he will not be on the MLB roster breaking out of spring training. He only played 38 games at Double-A before being stricken by the injury bug. He’s still got some more seasoning to do. Perhaps, we could see him as a September call-up but I would think that we’ll see him in 2019.