Independent Baseball Chatter – by Bob Wirz
Tim Adleman has been a pleasant story in recent years highlighted by the fact the onetime Lincoln and El Paso relief pitcher has spent much of the last two seasons with Cincinnati, leading the Reds in both innings pitched (122.1) and strikeouts (108) in 2017.
The 6-foot-5 right-hander was a starter in 33 of his 43 appearances in the National League (he didn’t start any games in the American Association) where he won nine times (9-15) with a 4.97 earned run average.
Adleman, now 30, has accepted a $100,000 signing bonus and nearly doubled his Cincinnati salary with a contract that will pay $1,050,000 to pitch for Korea’s Samsung Lions next season. The Lions have won the Korean Series championship seven times since 2002.
Adleman represents a prime example of a player not getting very far with a major league organization right out of college, going to the American Association for all of 2012, then succeeding fairly quickly the next time he got a major league-affiliated opportunity. He pitched at Georgetown for four years, was drafted by Baltimore but only got two seasons in the Orioles system before being released. He was a combined 0-2, 5.58 for 34 outings in the American Association, went to the Can-Am League the next season, then signed with the Reds who moved him into a starting role in 2015, the year prior to his major league debut.
Previously the chief spokesman for Baseball Commissioners Bowie Kuhn and Peter Ueberroth, Bob Wirz has been writing extensively about Independent Baseball since 2003. He is a frequent contributor to this site, has a blog, www.IndyBaseballChatter.com, and a book about his life, “The Passion of Baseball”, is available at traditional book-buying sites, or at www.WirzandAssociates.com.
