Texas Rangers sign Justin Miller to minor league deal

Per various reports on the Twitter, the Texas Rangers have signed righthanded pitcher Justin Miller to a minor league contract.  Miller opted out of his deal with the Seattle Mariners earlier this week.

This is normally not the sort of thing that would get a front page post, but given the state of the Rangers bullpen, Miller will probably be the team's primary 8th inning guy by Memorial Day.*

*  Just kidding.**

**  Not really.

Miller is 33, a former fifth round pick of Toronto in 1997 -- to put that in perspective, the first two picks Texas made in that draft were Jason Romano and Jason Grabowski, and they used their 7th round pick on Cal State-Fullerton catcher Mike Lamb.

He's a guy, has bounced around with a variety of organizations, had a couple of decent seasons out of the pen for San Francisco and Florida in the late-aughts.  He's someone the Rangers will probably be looking at insurance, and possibly to see if he might offer an upgrade over Brett Tomko as a middle reliever.

There was a tweet I saw a couple of days ago, questioning why any reliever would opt out of a deal with the Mariners, given the state of their pen.  This answers that question.