The Ottawa Titans announced they’ve signed Canadian right-hander Zach Cameron, along with two other pitchers, as a busy offseason rolls on.
Cameron, originally from Hamilton, Ont., will be making his Frontier League debut this season, after spending last year with his hometown Hamilton Cardinals in the Intercounty Baseball League.
In ten regular season appearances for the Cardinals, Cameron posted one win and a 2.84 earned run average (ERA). The 24-year-old also played five seasons of collegiate baseball at Niagara University, where he notched a 4.24 ERA and struck out 176 batters over 167.2 innings.
Cameron will be the first Ontarian, and only the third Canadian, on the Titans roster.
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Ottawa also signed Brett Garcia and Takuma Uchima, a pair of righties that will help shore up the Titans’ pitching staff.
Garcia, a product of Long Beach, Calif., played collegiately at, among other schools, Baylor University and Abilene Christian University before starting his professional career last season with the Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks of the American Association.
With the RedHawks, Garcia went 1-2 and had 16 strikeouts in 13 appearances. He also started a handful of games in college, though it remains to be seen whether Titans manager Bobby Brown will use him in Ottawa’s rotation.
Uchima will join Garcia as a newcomer to the nation’s capital, after spending six seasons in the Japanese Eastern League. A 26-year-old from Okinawa, Japan, Uchima last played for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, where he went 1-2 as a reliever.
According to a Titans press release, Uchima attended Asia University in Toyko and also represented Japan with the country’s u22 squad at the 2019 Japan-USA Collegiate Baseball Championship Series.
Leaving the bullpen, the Titans also re-inked utility man Taylor Wright, who is going into his fourth season with Ottawa.
In baseball, utility players are known for their ability to play a variety of defensive positions. For instance, Wright split his time between the infield and outfield last season, and even pitched nine innings of relief, in which he struck out four batters.
The 27-year-old Canadian, hailing from North Vancouver, B.C., also had a .240 batting average and nine home runs over a career-high 92 games last season, in which he helped lead the Titans to their second-ever playoff berth. Ottawa ultimately won the wildcard game over Tri-City before falling in three games to the eventual champions, the Québec Capitales.
Ottawa starts its 2025 season on May 9, when they will travel to North Carolina to play the Down East Bird Dawgs. The home opener is slated for May 20, when the Titans will welcome the New Jersey Jackals at Ottawa Stadium.
