What do we know about this guy?Red Sox Sign Taiwanese Prospect Chih-Jung Liu
By Dylan A. Chase | October 23, 2019 at 2:30pm CDT
The Red Sox have agreed to terms with 20-year-old Taiwanese righthander Chih-Jung Liu for $750K, reports Pete Abraham of The Boston Globe (link).
Liu is a former two-way player with a fastball clocked as high as 98 mph in recent months. Abraham notes that a large high school workload forced Liu to abandon pitching in his first collegiate year with Taipei City’s Culture University, but a 2019 return to the bump yielded newfound velocity. Liu teamed with Red Sox infield prospect Tzu-Wei Lin on Taiwan’s national squad in this month’s Asian Baseball Championship series, taking home tournament MVP honors en route to his country’s first ABC gold medal. Liu is set to play for Taiwan in the upcoming Premier12 tournament, an Olympic qualifier trial.
Following the firing of former Team President Dave Dombrowski, it’s fair to say that the Red Sox farm has seen better days. MLB.com’s midseason ranking identified just one “Top 100” prospect within their system (infielder Triston Casas placed 85th), and other organizational rankings generally placed Boston’s young ranks as among the game’s bottom-third. Under the temporary leadership quartet of Eddie Romero, Zack Scott, Brian O’Halloran, and Raquel Ferreira, it appears that Boston’s operations staff is searching far and wide in their search for farm reinforcement.