Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 8, 2002
Ask any minor-leaguer and he'll tell you his goal is to move up through the ranks one level per season. For a player starting in Rookie League, that would put him in the majors at the end of his sixth season.
It may have taken seven games, but Doug Waechter is right back on that course.
The former Northeast High two-sport star was promoted from Charleston to Bakersfield after Monday's game against the Capital City Bombers. The promotion moves Waechter to the Rays' highest Class A affiliate, where he would have started this season had he remained on the one-team-per-year schedule he seemed set on keeping.
Waechter was taken in the third round of the 1999 draft and gave up a football scholarship at South Florida, opting to go to Princeton, the Rays' Rookie League affiliate. He spent the next season at Hudson Valley, where he became the first in the Rays organization to pitch a nine-inning no-hitter, then pitched all of last season with Charleston. His record coming into this season was 12-20 with a 4.52 ERA.
Waechter arrives in the California League with a 3-3 record, 3.47 ERA and 36 strikeouts and 16 walks in 361/3 innings. In his final appearance as a RiverDog, he allowed six runs on seven hits through four, striking out eight.
SIGN THAT PITCHER UP: Take all the problems the Rays are having on the major-league level as relief pitchers blow ninth-inning leads on a seemingly daily basis. Now add the team's propensity to promote homegrown players quickly, and you wonder just how long it will be before Lee Gardner slips into a Rays uniform. The Durham closer, who signed as an undrafted free agent from Central Michigan in 1998, leads the International League with nine saves in nine chances in his first season as a closer.
BYE-BYE BUDDY: Charleston manager Buddy Biancalana was ejected from Monday's game after arguing a close play for the second time in four innings. It was the third time in 31 games Biancalana has been dismissed early.
HUFFING ALONG: This is Aubrey Huff's spring so far: He was sent by the Rays to Durham in spring training after spending most of last season in the majors. He then was hit by a ball off Jared Sandberg's bat in his first Bulls workout, breaking a cheekbone. That was followed by 11/2 hours of surgery in which doctors cut him above the eyebrow and below the eyelid to insert a titanium plate.
Huff was told he would be out until about the All-Star break but made his Durham debut before the season's first month ended.
Huff, who doctors said was a couple millimeters from losing sight in the eye, is hitting .321 with 8 RBIs and 5 runs scored as he tries to play first base full time for the first time in his career.
After all that, you might think Huff would be longing to get as far from Durham as possible. That's not all true.
"The fan support is great," he told the Durham Herald-Sun. "And I think the field itself is better than at (Tropicana Field)."
INJURY UPDATE: Orlando's Matt Diaz, who led the organization last season in hits, RBIs and doubles and was second with a .328 average, was placed on the disabled list with an injured wrist.