Maikel Franco hit his 15th home run of the year off a good prospect in A.J. Cole Hmm…been starting a lot of posts with “Maikel Franco” lately. That’s a good sign. Kelly Dugan’s been out two days in a row now. That’s the opposite of a good sign. Haven’t heard about it, hopefully he’s just dinged up and will be back shortly.

Three hits and three strikeouts in three innings for Edubray Ramos for WIL. His ERA is sliding down to near 1.00. And GCL lost to the rival Yankees to fall two games back of the Bombers’ affiliate in the playoff hunt. The 7-2 score could have been worse, but the Phils managed two double plays and three pick-offs. Three games left in their regular season. Not looking good for a playoff berth there.

Just FYI – there’s a good conversation about historically lousy Phillies pitchers going in the General Discussion thread. Head on over there to join in.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/25/2014 →

Maikel Franco was 2-4 with a double following up his Cycle from Saturday. Cam Perkins went 3-3 – his first multi-hit game since August 2. Aaron Nola gave up 1R on 4H, 1HR, 1BB and 5K in 5IP – his best outing at AA.

Art Charles hit his 19th home run, and his fifth in his last seven games. JP Crawford hit two bombs, his second two-homer game this month. Matt Imhof allowed 2R on 6H, 1HR, 1BB and 4k in 4IP. His 27K:5BB in 26.1IP at Lakewood is real nice.

Wanna see something not so nice? Check out MItch Gueller’s road splits for the year.  I showed them to my dog and he ran to hide behind the couch. True story, I swear.

One week and one day to go, folks, as four teams, LV, REA, LKW and WIL have wrap-around series ending on Labor Day. CLR wraps up Sunday. DSL ended unceremoniously with a rain cancellation yesterday. GCL still fighting for a playoff spot – they’re one game back of the Yankees to be their division’s representative and that regular season ends on Thursday.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/24/2014 →

Maikel Franco hit for the cycle. If you’re expecting a big analysis on that, here it is:

MAIKEL FRANCO HIT FOR THE CYCLE WOW!!!

Also worth noting that Franco had two homers on the day, the other was in game one of the double header. He was 6-7 on the day, proving that Syracuse’s manager hates pitch-arounds and intentional walks, I guess.

MAG has worked eight scoreless innings in a row, Jeremy horst struck out six in four innings as the bullpen starter in game 2, and Freddy Galvis wasn’t in the line-up because he was called up to Philly. He’d earned it – he had seven multi-hit games and was OPSing .867 for the month of August. Carlos Alonso hit a grand slam and Jake Fox hit his 21st home run of the season for Reading. Fox was behind the plate for that game.

Brian Pointer went deep (15) and Roman Quinn stole a base (30), while Kevin Walter worked well for the second straight start. Not at all sure what to think of that. Dylan Cozens also went deep for the 15th time this year, while Zach Green was 2-4 with two doubles. Willians Astudillo is hitting .492 for the month with an ISO of .048. Catching will be his salvation. Otherwise, he’s a singles-hitting, never walking first baseman.

Rhys Hoskins was 2-3 with a double and a homer, and David Whitehead took care of business as usual. CLR for him in April, I’d guess. And Lewis Alezones allowed 1R on 2H 0BB and 4K in 6IP in what was his longest outing of the year. The 18-year-old has an 0.87 WHIP and 27K:5BB in 30IP this season. Really impressive. Kind of excited for his prospects going forward.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/23/2014 →

I love that the Red Sox employ a guy at their AAA affiliate called “Steven Wright”.  Any ballplayer out there named “Denis Leary” will always have a home. Nice night from Adam Loewen for Reading – 3R 2ER 3H 4BB 8K in 7.2IP. Colt Murray pitched well in relief again, 1H 1K in 2.1 IP and he stranded Loewen’s last runner. Jason Parks wrote up Murray at recently Baseball Prospectus, in case you missed it. Reading came back in the ninth on a tying homer from Raywilly Gomez, and you know I wasn’t going to miss a chance to mention that name. Pete Lavin walked it off with a single in the 12th.

Art Charles had home runs in both games of CLR’s double header (17,18). He’s got homers in four of his last six games, and four in the last four days, (they’ve had two double headers in four days – poor pitchers). Charles, Roman Quinn, Jessie Valentin and Herlis Rodriguez all had two-hit games in the opener, Chris Serritella followed suit in the night cap. Cody Forsythe has struck out 42 and walked just 9 in 32 A+ innings this year. Impressive numbers for last year’s 25th round pick. Expect him in AA next year.

Lakewood’s Yacksel Rios threw 6.1 shutout IP, allowing 6H 2BB with 4K. He’s worth considering in the back of the Top 30, IMO. Willians Astudillo is now 29-59 on the month. All but two of them have been singles. OPSing 1.042 in August. And Dylan Cozens stole his 21st base. For whatever that’s worth. Ricardo Pinto struck out nine men in six innings of one run ball for WIL. Solid once again. And 21-yr-old UDFA Josh Taylor, a big lefty from Georgia College & State University, which sounds like a collegiate merger gone horribly wrong, pitched really well for the GCL – 2BB and 5K in 4.1 hitless, shutout innings in relief of Sam McWilliams. There seems to have been an uptick in interesting UDFA activity since the draft dropped rounds 41-50 a couple years ago. Maybe those next 300 guys are producing about as many interesting names as they would have otherwise, and it’s just magnified since they stand out as undrafted guys more than they would have as 47th round picks.

Failed to mention this yesterday – Marc Narducci of the Inquirer is reporting that Jesse Biddle is shut down for the rest of the year after his quad injury on Saturday night. Not a real surprise there. Probably not enough time to properly rest and rehab even a middle-of-the-road muscle injury before the end of the season.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/22/2014 →

Cameron Rupp went 3-3 with a double, his second multi-hit game in the last three. I imagine a solid last ten days or so would be welcome for him at the end of this total bummer of a season. Brian Pointer was 2-4 with a double and Gabriel Lino was 2-4 with his fourth home run for CLR, (5th on the year across two levels). Edubray Ramos with a good outing – three Ks and one hit over two scoreless. He’s struck out 14 and walked just one in 14.2 IP for WIL.

Winding down here, folks. Not much left for these guys to do except stay healthy, and for the GCL squad, push for the playoffs. Many guys will be hitting instructs, and we could get some info on our 2014 July 2 international guys. Of course we’ll get a list of AFL players from the US born/Canadian ranks sometime shortly after the season, where hopefully we get a lot of scouting on the real prospects in that group, and a lot of the upper level foreign born players will play in their home countries’ pro leagues this winter, where we likely won’t get any scouting at all.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/21/2014 →

Lehigh Valley was stymied by Pawtucket pitching, managing just three hits and four walks. MAG threw two scoreless innings of relief, allowing a walk and striking out one. Kelly Dugan was 2-3 with two doubles plus two walks for Reading as Severino Gonzalez shutout Bowie for six innings and the bullpen completed the job. Gonzalez was throwing strikes, about 2/3 on the night, and he’s allowed 2R, 8H, 4BB and 13Ks in 13IP over two starts since being skipped at the beginning of the month to keep his innings down as he finishes out his first full season as a starter. Seems like the rest did him some good.

Roman Quinn was a triple short of the cycle, including his sixth home run of the year. Art Charles hit his second in as many nights (16), and Mark Leiter was strong over seven innings – he struck out seven after striking out 10 in 6.2 last time out. He’s walked just 35 men in 135 IP this year over two levels. I imagine he’ll start the spring fighting for a spot in Reading’s rotation. Jia Tromp hit his 13th home run, tying a Williamsport franchise record, shared by Zach Green from 2013. And I imagine the off-season can’t come soon enough for Chris Oliver. Another pretty good performance from Denton Keys – 2R 1ER 8H 1BB 6K in 6IP – he’s had four pretty good ones in a row. His offense did just about nothing to support him.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/20/2014 →

Here’s a quick write-up of what I saw in Bowie last night. Aaron Nola pitched pretty well for Reading. His FB was sitting 89-93, per @stoltz_baseball, though the stadium gun had him touching 96 on one pitch. Not so much. Worked around the edges of the zone fairly well, and got some called strikes with his off-speed pitches. He got BABIPed pretty badly in the fifth, with a single, followed by two consecutive line-hugging bunts that laid waste to Carlos Alonso’s defensive positioning/mobility, a spectacularly-turned double-play grounder from Serna and Cartwright that pushed across a run, and a flyball out. Not sure what more he could have done except try to hex those two bunters.

Jake Fox’s homerun hit the LF fair-pole about 35-40 feet up, not far from the top. Were I to guess in a distance, it would be 700 feet. That’s probably an over-estimate. Kelly Dugan made a nice sliding grab early on, and Albert Cartwright stopped a grounder in shallow right with a fine diving grab and got up quickly to throw out the runner. Cartwright also bunted home Peter Lavin on a perfectly executed squeeze play. No chance to get Lavin at home. Colt Murray was solid in relief, sitting in the low-mid 90s, with a couple nasty breaking balls mixed in with some just-decent-looking offerings. That’s my untrained eye, so who knows. I had to leave after Top 8, so I missed the badness. Good move on my part. I did not need to see Nefi Ogando give up a grand slam.

Elsewhere, Maikel Franco went 3-4 with a double, as he looks to salvage a decent August. OPSing .721 now on the month, .685 on the year. Jessie Valentin picked up his first hit and first steal in A+, JPC stole two on Kyle Schwarber, Quinn stole one and was caught once as he went 2-2 with two walks in the night cap, while Brian Pointer (14) and Art Charles (15) went deep.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/19/2014 →

Not much to talk about from the two games on the schedule. Jason Zgardowski, the new UDFA, got his first pro start for GCL. Venn Biter has five triples on the year. Tow DSL guys hit their first home runs of the season. Ran and off-days everywhere else.

Heading out to see Aaron Nola and the RPhils tonight at Bowie Baysox. Anyone who might be around, please give me a shout on Twitter or send me an email in advance (brad dot dc dot engler at gmail) and maybe we can say hello. I’m going to try to squat on some seats behind the scouts if I can and then go out to the bullpen and ask them who reads PhuturePhillies.com and offer them my autograph.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/18/2014 →

Maikel Franco hit a walk-off three run home run for Lehigh Valley (12). Phillippe Aumont with two clean innings, including 15/17 pitches for strikes and three Ks. Hoby Milner threw a three-hit shutout, striking out five Binghampton Mets. He’s been hot and cold his last five starts. Roman Quinn 1-4 with a BB and a steal, and he was caught stealing on a pickoff. JP Crawford was 3-5, Brian Pointer was 1-4 with a double and a walk, and Art Charles was 0-0 with five walks, (five!!!). Kevin Walter threw five shutout innings and struck out six. Good for him. Jim Peyton wrote up that game here.

Five guys had multi-hit games for Lakewood, lead by Carlos Tocci’s 3-4 plus a walk and Andrew Knapp’s 3-5 with a double. Aaron Brown has multiple hits in all four of his games with Lakewood. Brandon Leibrandt had another strong outing, striking out five and allowing 1R on 5H and 1BB.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/17/2014 →

Lots to talk about today – I neglected to mention a promotion yesterday – Jose Pujols was moved up to WIL after they moved Aaron Brown to Lakewood. The 18-year-old Pujols has two doubles and three Ks in eight NYPL PAs thus far, after OPSing over .700 in his return trip through the GCL, with 15 XBH (5HR) in about 165 PAs. Striking out over 30% of the time is not going to cut it, though. Also of note from a personnel standpoint, JP Crawford was back on the field after a couple days on the shelf with what Amaro described to reporters as a “twisted ankle”.

Jesse Biddle left his start after some poor results, and once it became apparent to his coaches and trainers that he was hurt.

So he was hurt before the game even started, which means he tried to pitch through an injury. This is generally seen in the public as a good thing when it works (toughness) and a bad thing when it doesn’t (dumbness). Hopefully this one turns out to be in between – the “it didn’t work but he didn’t further damage himself.”

Seth Rosin pitching well lately – 12K and 4BB in his last 13.1 IP. And so the club will again have to decide whether to protect him in the Rule 5 or leave him exposed. For the record, I don’t know what to think about that. Aaron Altherr with his 14th home run, his fifth in the last ten games. He’s hit two more than his previous career high with some 70 fewer PAs, and his K Rate is below 22%, a 5% improvement on last year. Center field defense remains the key to his game. If he can do it, for real, he could be a valuable big league regular.

The aforementioned JP Crawford was 2-4 plus a walk and a steal (7, he’s 21/31 across two levels this year), Roman Quinn was 1-4 plus his 27th steal in 34 tries (79%), and Brian Pointer was 1-4 plus a walk, and hit his 13th HR – he’s OPSing over 1.000 for the month and .760 for the year. That’s nearly a 100 point OPS improvement over last year, and his .904 OPS in the second half of the year is about 275 points higher than his first half. Colin Kleven was good in that one, and he’s got an FIP of 3.68 on the year. Not bad at all. We’ll see how he handles AA next year. For LKW, Cozens, Brown and Astudillo had multi-hit games. Astudillo actually drew a walk, (18 on the year matches his 18 Ks), and Cozens stole his 20th base. Sam McWilliams allowed 3H 0 BB 2K in 5 scoreless IP for GCL. Solid, if not spectacular.

Continue reading Box Score Recap – 8/16/2014 →