Old friend alert for Dodgers fans. One time LA outfield prospect DJ Peters is one step closer to returning to Major League Baseball after spending part of last season in Korea. Peters inked a minor league deal with the Detroit Tigers.
Tigers reporter Evan Woodbery shared the news on Twitter on Wednesday.
The 27-year-old local product out of Glendora, CA, made his MLB debut with the Dodgers in 2021. After struggling with the team in an 18 game sample size (he went 5-26 for a .192 average), he was designated for assignment and traded to the Texas Rangers in August of that year.
Things did not get much better with Texas as he hit just .198 over 52 games and was released in the offseason to pursue an opportunity with the Lotte Giants in Korea’s KBO league. To risk sounding like a broken record here, things again did not go very well for Peters. In 85 games with the Giants, he hit .228 with a .701 OPS and that was all she wrote abroad.
DJ signed a minor league deal with the Washington Nationals in September and finished out the 2022 season in triple-A.
At one point in time, Peters was a top-15 prospect in the Dodgers system. He earned praise from manager Dave Roberts as a good defender in the outfield and as a player who put in the work at the field to try and be his best. Unfortunately, baseball hasn’t been overly kind to the former 2016 fourth round draft pick.
Hope remains that Peters can turn it around and pull off his own career renaissance much like Trayce Thompson did with LA last year. Best of luck to DJ in Detroit!