Infielder Bobby Dalbec has opted out of his minor league deal with the Brewers, according to a report from Francys Romero of BeisbolFR. Dalbec first signed with Milwaukee back in May.
The 30-year-old Dalbec has participated in parts of six major league seasons at this point. A fourth-round pick by the Red Sox back in 2016, he rose to top-100 prospect status before making his big league debut during the 2020 season and posted outrageously good numbers in 23 games for the club during the shortened season. He followed that performance up by serving as the club’s regular first baseman in 2021, and slashed an impressive .243/.308/.511 with 33 homers in 156 games between those two seasons.
While that start to Dalbec’s career was extremely promising, things have gone downhill from there in a hurry. He was well below replacement level in 117 games for the Red Sox in 2022 as he slashed a paltry .215/.283/.369 with just 12 home runs and a massive 33.4% strikeout rate. He lost his grip on a starting role with the club in September of that year and since the end of the 2022 campaign he’s appeared in just 65 total games at the big league level with 167 plate appearances. The majority of that work came in an up-and-down part time role with the Red Sox, for whom he hit just .159/.234/.235 in 146 plate appearances between 2023 and ’24 before he was outrighted off the roster in September of last year.
That outright allowed him to elect free agency back in November and he eventually latched on with the White Sox on a minor league deal. He made it into seven games but went just 4-for-18 with three walks and six strikeouts before being designated for assignment. He wound up landing with the Brewers on a minor league pact, but did not get called up to the majors even after hitting an impressive .266/.356/.498 in 61 games at the club’s Triple-A affiliate in Nashville. That’s not necessarily surprising given the emergence of Andrew Vaughn, who the club acquired from the White Sox in the deal that sent Aaron Civale to Chicago earlier this summer.
In 17 games for Milwaukee, Vaughn has been crushing the ball to the tune of a .386/.448/.772 slash line with ten extra-base hits (including six home runs) in just 67 trips to the plate. It’s a very small sample size, of course, but between Vaughn’s hot streak and the eventual return of Rhys Hoskins from the injured list, there wasn’t much room for Dalbec in the club’s first base mix. While Dalbec is capable of playing other positions around the infield, he’s not a particularly well-regarded defender at any of them and appeared to be blocked at third base, where he was spending the plurality of his time with Nashville, by offseason addition Caleb Durbin.
Now that Dalbec is on the open market, he’s free to sign with any of the league’s 30 clubs if there’s a team interested in adding a bit of depth to their corner infield mix now that the trade deadline has passed. In the event that Dalbec doesn’t find an enticing MLB offer, Romero suggests that he could turn his attention to the KBO or NPB overseas. Power-hitting players who struggle to establish themselves in the majors often find considerable success in Asia, with Matt Davidson and Eric Thames standing out as particularly notable examples from the KBO league.