BOSTON — Around this time last October, Ryan Brasier was literally thousands of miles away from MLB relevance.
A journeyman reliever toiling for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp in Japan’s professional baseball league, the 30-year-old Brasier’s résumé read as follows: nine big-league innings for the Angels in 2013; Tommy John surgery the subsequent year and 2015 on the shelf; a ‘16 season entirely with Oakland’s Triple A affiliate; and now a year with the Carp in which he’d been briefly demoted to the Japanese minor leagues but otherwise pitched decently if unspectacularly. He was, quite simply, just another guy—one with a better chance of swimming across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to his home in Texas than of making a major league roster.