2016-17 BBM Winter Awards: Jake Sanchez, Pitcher of the Year

These awards are never easy to assign winners to and 2016-17 Pitcher of the Year was no exception.  Who to choose?  Should it go to a starting pitcher who led the Mexican Pacific League in wins and strikeouts while finishing third in ERA?  Or a relief pitcher who was as close to a sure thing out of the bullpen as you can find, with a MexPac-leading 21 saves and an ERA of 0.28 while only allowing one earned run all season until the final game of the recently-concluded Caribbean Series?  For this particular award, we went with the closer from California.  We'll get to the first guy later.

A 27-year-old righty, Sanchez graduated in 2008 from Brawley's Union High School, which produced future MLB pitchers Sergio Romo, Rudy Seanez and Sid Monge.  After pitching juco ball at nearby Imperial Valley College and finishing his collegiate career at DIII Iowa Wesleyan (alumni of former All-Star 2B Davey Lopes), the undrafted Sanchez spent parts of two summers with Joliet of the independent Frontier League before signing with the White Sox as a free agent in 2013.  He was assigned to Great Falls of the rookie Pioneer League that summer, where he led the loop with a 2.87 ERA and 76 strikeouts en route to a 6-3 record as a starter and was named Pitcher of the Year.

The next two seasons saw Sanchez compile a 24-13 overall record for both organization at three levels of minor league ball (including a 1-1 mark in two starts at AAA Nashville in 2015), the year the Chisox traded him to the A's organization.  The winter of 2015-16 marked a turning point in Sanchez' career, as he was converted into a reliever in Mexicali by manager Edgar Gonzalez.  Although he struggled for the Aguilas that year (4 saves and a 5.14 ERA), Sanchez showed enough out of the bullpen to continue as a reliever in AA Midland last summer.  It wasn't an auspicious season, as Jake was 7-5 with eight saves in a team-leading 44 appearances but his 3.10 ERA was a marked improvement over the 4.50 figure he put up for the RockHounds in 2015 as a starter.

At the beginning of his second year with Mexicali last October, some improvement was hoped for but nobody expected what Sanchez accomplished.  After claiming the closer's role for the Aguilas under then-manager Gil Velazquez, the 6'1" 205-pounder proceeded to stand the LMP on its ear as he put together a 1-0 record with a league-leading 21 saves in 30 appearances, walking just five batters in 31.2 innings and striking out 27 batters.  Sanchez' regular season success carried over into the playoffs as he reigstered five more saves and striking out 21 in 17.1 frames over ten appearances, then recording two more saves in the Caribbean Series for the Aguilas before giving up his second earned run over the entire season to Puerto Rico's Caguas in the tenth inning of the championship game to take the loss.  Even so, he was named as the top reliever in the CS by writers and broadcasters.

After ending the 2016 with an uncertain future in the A's system, Jake Sanchez has converted a dominant winter into a berth with the Mexican National Team under Edgar Gonzalez in next month's World Baseball Classic.  It's impossible that his work over the past four months didn't catch the eye of GM Billy Beane and others in the Oakland front office.  He sure caught ours and becomes the first reliever to win this award since former Pirates hurler Jose Silva with Culiacan in 2010-11.

BBM PITCHER OF THE YEAR WINNERS
2010       Bobby Cramer, Quintana Roo
2010-11  Jose Silva, Culiacan
2011       Francisco Campos, Campeche
2015-16  Javier Solano, Mexicali
2016       Yoanner Negrin, Yucatan
2016-17  Jake Sanchez, Mexicali

Jose Contreras K's 10 in Tigres shutout at Yucatan

Former major league pitcher Jose Contreras continued to turn back the hands of time Thursday in Quintana Roo's 2-0 shutout over Yucatan at Merida's Parque Kukulkan as 9,432 spectators looked on. The 44-year-old Cuban blanked the Leones on four hits over six innings, striking out ten batters and walking two.

Contreras left with the game still a scoreless tie and did not earn the decision as Raul Barron pitched the seventh and eighth to get the win, bringing his record to 5-0 on the season.  Alex Liddi and Sergio Contreras hit back-to-back RBI singles in the ninth to put the defending champions ahead, leaving it to Esmailin Caridad to come in to record a 1-2-3 bottom of the ninth for his eighth save of the year as the 22-13 Tigres slipped past 21-14 Yucatan into second place in the Mexican League's South Division, trailing only the 24-11 Puebla Pericos, who had an eleven-game winning streak snapped Wednesday in Veracruz.

The story of the night Thursday, however, was the pitching of Contreras, who recorded his second ten-strikeout performance in his past four starts.  The former White Sox hurler is now 3-3 with a 3.02 earned-run average in eight starts for Quintana Roo.  His showing in Merida was payback of sorts after the Leones touched him up for six hits and three runs over 3.2 innings in his first start of the season April 1 in Cancun.  Since then, Contreras has registered a 2.66 ERA and went the distance in the Tigres' 10-2 win over Laguna on April 24 in Torreon, whiffing ten Vaqueros' batsmen while spinning a seven-inning four-hitter.

Cancun is the latest stop in a long and winding career for Contreras, who was a mainstay for years with Cuba's Pinar del Rio team as well as a starter for that nation's gold-medal winning side at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics along with Baseball World Cup champions in Rome and Sydney before defecting while pitching at the Americas Series in Saltillo in October 2002.  He signed with the Yankees, as so many Cuban expats did at the time, and spent part of the 2004 season in New York as a 32-year-old "rookie" before being traded to the White Sox for fellow pitcher Esteban Loaiza in midseason.  The 6'4" right-hander was 41-25 between 2004 and 2006, pitching for the Chisox World Series winners in 2005 and in the All-Star Game in 2006.

Things started going south for Contreras in 2007 when, at a listed 35 years of age, he was 10-17 for Chicago with a 5.57 ERA.  Although he pitched all or part of six more MLB seasons for the White Sox, Rockies, Phillies and Pirates, he never won more than seven games again.  He was converted into a reliever during a short stay in Colorado during the 2009 season and never started a big league game again.

Contreras began a third stage of his career in 2014, when he started 23 games for Tijuana in the Mexican League and went 10-3 with a 3.49 ERA, striking out 140 hitters in 134 innings.  That led to a season in Taiwan with the Chinatrust Brothers before returning to Mexico this year to pitch for manager Roberto Vizcarra's Tigres, who will open a three-game home series against Carmen Friday night at Estadio Beto Avila.