leaguer

About once a month Judge will receive a comment from a waiter or a cashier who looks at his credit card and notes that he has the same name as the big leaguer.

In 2015, when he was a Tampa Bay Rays minor leaguer, Honeywell stepped into the dugout to see his teammates gawking at a 10-foot alligator hiding under the bench.

But as he rose through the Cardinals’ system and eventually established himself as a big leaguer, Edman developed a reputation for being fundamentally sound, versatile and polished on both sides of the ball, a player who didn’t wow you with eye-popping tools but did everything extremely well.

That’s both their identity and Miller Moss’ identity, the career minor leaguer now taking the biggest of hacks.

The Padres did expect big things from center fielder Jackson Merrill, eventually, but he opened last season at Class A, opened this season as a 20-year-old major leaguer and could close the season as NL rookie of the year.