Cleveland Indians officially release Daisuke Matsuzaka

He wasn’t a member of the Major League edition of the Cleveland Indians at any point in 2013, but Daisuke Matsuzaka (aka Dice-K) is officially unemployed as of Tuesday afternoon.

Jordan Bastian of MLB.com was the first to report Matsuzaka’s release by Cleveland:

Dice-K was brought in during the offseason by the Indians to compete for a rotation spot in Spring Training, but he failed to earn a spot after a competition with former Rays and Angels hurler Scott Kazmir. As a result, he was released by the club, but later signed a minor-league deal with Cleveland in order to maintain his MLB relevancy.

However, he hasn’t performed extremely well this season, finishing with a 3.92 ERA over 103.1 innings at triple-A, and he allowed 5 runs over 4 innings in his final start on Monday. On the bright side for Matsuzaka, he completed his run with a solid strikeout rate of 8.27 per 9 innings, and did show flashes of his previous effectiveness from Boston.

It isn’t clear whether Dice-K will attempt to grab an organizational spot elsewhere this season, but at 32 years old, he should be physically capable of pursuing a return. When things were good for him in Boston, they were very, very good (2.90 ERA in 2008), but he has come a long way since then, and there is no evidence that the 2008 version of Dice-K will ever return.