The dog days of August are difficult for players and fans alike. For teams without contention aspirations they can be even more bleak, which makes late-season call-ups that much more exciting. A glimpse of the future in the present can help tide us over through the final month and a half of a lost season, and its embers smolder through the bitter cold of the offseason. Today we get the first of those call-ups, and the most obvious.
Jake Fraley has looked like a man knowing he’s expected to make up for lost time. The Rays 2016 2nd rounder missed significant swaths of his pro career with a few medium-level injuries.