Hello everyone. After a long cold winter, and seeing brief glimpses in spring training, the minor league season kicks off Thursday, and we’re back to having lots of box scores to dissect and lots of players to analyze. With this in mind, I wanted to give a brief update, and then make two appeals to you, my loyal readers. First, Gregg, Dave and Chuck will again be helping me crank out reports for the full season affiliates. Dave will be following the 2010 Lakewood crop to Clearwater, Chuck will be covering Reading, and Gregg will continue his outstanding coverage of Lehigh Valley, which looks to have one of the best squads our AAA affiliate has had in a long time. I will also be coming out of retirement to write the weekly Lakewood report, as well as a weekly (or bi-weekly) notes column, if time permits. So look for those reports to start up in a couple of weeks once we have games to discuss. If you haven’t read my “how you can help phuturephillies.com in 2011” article, please do so. With so many games and so many interesting players to watch, input from you, the reader, who attends games sees our guys in action is vital to making this site even better. And my second appeal is this; lets try to strive for patience and rational analysis/discussion this season. As Brody Colvin taught us last year, making snap judgments after a few games is often foolish. Let’s wait until we have at least sort of meaningful samples, and let’s discuss things in a calm, reasonable manner. This site has grown leaps and bounds in 4+ years, and its something I’m incredibly proud of. For the most part, the people who read often and participate in the discussions do a great job of self-policing, ignoring the people just looking to get a rise out of others, and making this place great. I ask that everyone up their game even more this year, so I don’t have to be comments police. I want to spend more time writing articles for the site and looking for new features to add and less time playing blog sheriff.

With all of that said, here’s to a fantastic 2011 minor league season.