{"id":13272,"date":"2014-01-23T16:19:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-23T16:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/rays-agree-to-deal-with-closer-balfour\/"},"modified":"2014-01-23T21:40:16","modified_gmt":"2014-01-23T21:40:16","slug":"rays-agree-to-deal-with-closer-balfour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/rays-agree-to-deal-with-closer-balfour\/","title":{"rendered":"Rays agree to deal with closer Balfour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>St. Petersburg, FL (SportsNetwork.com) &#8211; The Tampa Bay Rays agreed to a two-year deal with closer Grant Balfour on Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>The pact, which was first reported by Fox Sports, is expected to pay the former Oakland closer $12 million over two years.<\/p>\n<p>Balfour, of course, reached an agreement on an apparent 2-year, $15 million deal with Baltimore earlier this offseason, but they backed out of deal due to issues with his throwing shoulder.<\/p>\n<p>Balfour, who missed the entire 2006 season recovering from surgery to repair a torn labrum recorded a career-high 38 saves for the A&#8217;s last season and went 1-3 with a 2.59 earned run average in 65 relief appearances.<\/p>\n<p>Over three seasons in Oakland, the 35-year-old right-hander went 9-7 with a 2.53 ERA while racking up 64 of his 72 career saves. he also appeared in at least 62 games in each of those seasons.<\/p>\n<p>The Australian-born Balfour owns a career 28-17 record with a 3.27 ERA and 514 strikeouts in 463 games with one start over 10 seasons with Minnesota, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay and Oakland.<\/p>\n<p>Balfour was 14-7 with a 3.33 ERA in four seasons with the Rays from 2007-10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>St. Petersburg, FL (SportsNetwork.com) &#8211; The Tampa Bay Rays agreed to a two-year deal with closer Grant Balfour on Thursday. The pact, which was first reported by Fox Sports, is expected to pay the former Oakland closer $12 million over two years. Balfour, of course, reached an agreement on an apparent 2-year, $15 million deal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[191,67,190],"class_list":["post-13272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb","tag-rays","tag-tampa-bay","tag-tampa-bay-rays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13274,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13272\/revisions\/13274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}