Minor League Profiles of Adam Dunn and Jay Bruce

Milb.com is running a series called Path of the Pros. They haven’t featured any current Reds yet, but former Red Adam Dunn was Wednesday’s featured player. It tells the story of Dunn’s rise within the Reds organization, starting with just before the Reds drafted him in 1998, up to his first partial season with the Reds in 2001. The story at the link also has a picture of Dunn in action as Quarterback of the Texas Longhorns. It is a really good read. It provides a lot of details about Dunn’s minor league path, his options and decisions with respect to baseball vs. football, and commentary from coaches about how hard he worked as a player within the Reds minor league organization. There was one snippet that I don’t recall reading in the past: Dunn was offered a promotion to the Majors in September 1999, but opted to work on his swing in the instructional league. “It wasn’t really fair to everyone else to go up then. They were battling for the playoffs and I knew ...