The youngest member of the Shorebirds is not some highly touted pitcher, but his occasional batterymate.
As he turns 19 today, Venezuelan Gabriel Lino has emerged as the Shorebirds’ top backstop, playing the bulk of the time despite the team having other, older catchers with more minor league experience. The Orioles may be high on Lino because of a nice 2011 season he put together in the Gulf Coast League, hitting .282/2/11/.832 OPS in 28 games – granted, it’s a small sample size but they apparently like the bat and the fact that over his three seasons in the minor leagues Lino has erased 30% of opposing runners with a strong, accurate arm.
So far in 2012 Lino has held his own in his first full-season experience. After yesterday’s game Gabriel was hitting a respectable .245 with 2 home runs (both in the same April 15 game, a 19-2 blowout of Greensboro) and 12 RBI. His OPS isn’t as good as last year’s, but hovers close to the league average at a .681 mark. One thing he will have to work on, though, is cutting down on strikeouts – his 35 Ks is second on the team. The pitching here is certainly of a much better caliber than it was in the Dominican Summer League, where in 2010 Lino piled up 28 walks vs. 21 strikeouts in 54 games.
Since he is so young, a repeat course of low-A ball may not be out of the question for Lino even if increases his average to the .280 neighborhood he inhabited last season. One thing he will have to develop as he moves through the system is the ability to learn his pitching staff and call good games, and a lot of that can only come from experience. There’s plenty of time for Gabriel to move up the system, so he may as well get used to the grind of a 140-game season here.